>'iii 



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JOHN WEBSTER and the 
ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 



The 

COLLECTED POEMS 

of 

RUPERT BROOKE 

WITH A 

PHOTOGBAVURE PORTRAIT 
0/ the AUTHOR 

Cloth, $1.25 net Leather, $2.00 net 



"It is packed with the stuff of which poetry 
is made: vivid imagination, the phrase that 
leaps to life, youth, music, and the ecstasy 
born of their joy when genius keeps them com- 
pany." — The Outlook. 



JOHN LANE COMPANY 

PUBLISHERS NEW YORK 



JOHN WEBSTER and the 

ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 



By RUPERT BROOKE 



JOHN LANE COMPANY 
NEW YORK .-. .-. .-. MCMXVI 






Copyright, 1916, 
By John Lane Company 




NOV 29 1916 



Press of 

J. J. Little & Ives Company 

New York. U.S.A. 



©CU445852 



NOTE 

This hook was written in 1911-12, and was the 
'dissertation' with which the author won his Fellow- 
ship at King's College, Cambridge, in 1913. 

The page-references are to Dyce's one-volume 

edition, 

E.M. 



PREFACE 

I HAVE tried to write a small book about John 
Webster. That is to say, I have tried to say 
the truth about him, as much of it as is 
necessary to enable anyone who reads him to 
understand him. I have not tried to explain him 
entirely to anyone who has not read him, though 
I hope that any person in that condition may 
get a rough idea of him from this book. 

I have tried to explain Webster for a reader, 
but not to explain him away. So I have endeav- 
oured to keep to my own province, and not to 
trespass on ground reserved for worthier feet — 
Webster's. I conceive that there is much that he 
can explain better than I. So I have, at least, 
abstained from paraphrasing. 

To explain Webster's writings it is first neces- 
sary to determine what he wrote, and also such 
smaller questions as when he wrote it, and how 
he came to write it. Such questions, the ques- 
tions of "scientific" literary criticism, I deal with 
in the Appendices. I have taken some care to 
get the most probable answers in each case; for 
there is such a lot of bad logic and fudging on 

vii 



/ 



viii PREFACE 

such points in modern literary science, that one 
always has to go over the whole ground com- 
pletely for oneself. 

When these points are settled, with as much 
certitude as possible, there are still other points 
on which it is necessary to have right opinions in 
order to understand Webster. One must know 
what a play is; one must know how the Eliza- 
bethan drama arose; and one must know what 
the Elizabethan drama was. I have given a 
chapter to each of these points; not pretending 
to cover the whole ground, or to do the work of 
a whole book; but endeavouring to correct some 
of the more misleading wrong ideas, and to hint 
at some of the more important right ones. These 
chapters, of course, though nominally not about 
Webster, should be even more important to any 
understanding of him than the Appendices. And 
I have given two long chapters to the more 
direct consideration of what Webster wrote, and 
what its more usual characteristics are. 

The Bibliography is, I think, fairly complete 
with regard to Webster. I did not think it neces- 
sary to make a bibliography of books on the 
wider subjects. 

It may seem, in some cases, as if I contra- 
dicted myself in different parts of the book; as, 
for instance, when I say that it is impossible to 



PREFACE ix 

understand a play wholly from the text, and later 
seem to believe that I do understand plays wholly 
from the text. I think I have not really contra- 
dicted myself. Part of the business of the earlier 
chapters is to prevent the necessity of continually 
repeated qualifications throughout the work. To 
express my exact meaning on each occasion 
would have meant covering the page with 
"in so far as it is possible's," and "I think's," and 
"possibly's," and "perhaps's"; which makes the 
style feeble and muffles the idea. I have, per- 
haps, gone too far in this direction already. 



CONTENTS 



X xvilifA.C/£j» • • • • • 

CHAPTER 

I. The Theatre .... 
II. The Origins of Elizabethan Drama 

III. The- Elizabethan Drama . 

IV. John Webster .... 
V. Some Characteristics of Webster 



PAGE 

vii 

15 
38 
62 
84 
123 



Appendices 

A. The Authorship of the later Appius and Virginia 165 

B. Miscellaneous 

C. Sir Thomas Wyatt 

D. Westward Ho and Northward Ho 

E. The Malcontent . 

F. The White Devil . 

G. The Duchess of Malfi . 
H. A Monumental Column 

I. The Devil's Law-case . 
J. A Cure for a Cuckold . 

Bibliography .... 





. 211 




. 214 




. 222 




. 234 




. 237 




. 246 




. 254 




. 255 


• !« 


. 260 


1*1 I« 


. 277 



JOHN WEBSTER and the 
ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 



JOHN WEBSTER 

Chapter I 

THE THEATRE 

Anyone who has read, with any alertness, more 
than a little of the mass of critical and editorial 
comments, whether of the last three or of the last 
three hundred years, upon Elizabethan plays, 
must often have felt a helpless and bewildered 
irritation at the absence of any standard or uni- 
form grounds of judgment; both in the critics, 
and, on inspection, in himself. This is not the 
place to attempt to lay a deep aesthetic founda- 
tion; but, I think, it will be useful to try to fix 
the meanings of certain words and phrases, and 
to give a provisional answer to some of the more 
important questions. 

"What is Art?" is a question which most 
writers on subjects connected with literature, 
painting, plays, music, society, or life, are ready 
with an equal cheerfulness to ask or to answer. 
They may be right ; but to me they seem to make 

15 



16 JOHN WEBSTER 

a gigantic, unconscious, and probably unjustifi- 
able assumption. It is quite doubtful, and it is 
nowadays continually more doubted, whether the 
word "Art" has properly any meaning at all. 
But it has so obsessed men's minds, that they 
start with an inevitable tendency to believe that 
it has a meaning. In the same way, those who 
believe in Art are generally inclined to believe in 
a single object at which all Art, that is to say all 
the arts, aim: Beauty. It may turn out to be 
true that both Art and Beauty are real and 
useful names; but the attitude of mind that as- 
sumes that they are is deplorable. The most 
honest and most hopeful course to pursue, is to 
say that there are certain kinds of human activity 
which seem to hang together in classes, such as 
reading books, hearing music, seeing pictures; 
and to examine our states of mind while we fol- 
low these pursuits, to see how far they are of 
one kind in each "art," and in all, and whether 
all successful works of art do seem to us to have 
some quality in common which can be called 
Beauty. 

The situation seems to me as if men had agreed 
to say "The emotions caused in human beings 
by pins, walking-sticks, feathers, and crowbars, 
acting through the tactile sense, are all of one 
unique kind. It is called Grumph. Pins, etc.. 



THE THEATRE 17 

are called the grumphs. Grumph is one of the 
holiest things in this melancholy world," and so 
forth. And soon they'd say, "But, philosophi- 
cally, what is Grumph?" Then they'd argue. 
They would come to some conclusion which, as 
you cannot tickle with a crowbar, would pre- 
clude tickling with feathers; and they would ex- 
communicate all those who used feathers for 
tickling with the formula, "That is not 
Grumph!" They would write Treatises on any 
one grumph, on the "Pin-grumph," say, care- 
fully keeping in mind all the time that what they 
said would have to be more or less true of the 
other grumphs too. Some would lay great im- 
portance on the fact that, as you were tickled 
with feathers, you were, in a way, also tickled by 
being beaten with a walking-stick. Others 
would discover the ferule of the pin, and the 
quill, shaft, and two vanes of barbs of the crow- 
bar. An Oxford don would arise to declare that 
all grumph continually approximated to the con- 
dition of pins. . . . 

I have put the affair, as I see it, in a figure, 
and with other names, in order to show its un- 
reason more clearly, and far more shortly, than 
is possible if the prejudice-clad and elusive word 
"Art" is used. In either case, the sensible reply 
to it all is, "We have sticks and pins, plays and 



18 JOHN WEBSTER 

poems. These we know. These are, as certainly 
as anything is, real classes of things. Begin from 
them, and from the emotions they move. And 
see if thence you climb upwards to Grumph, to 
Art." 

This attitude does, directly or indirectly, shut 
out various bands of ideas and thinkers ; my ob- 
jections to each of which I could state at length. 
A short enumeration of these tendencies of mind 
in viewing questions of "Art" may hint why, 
psychologically at any rate, they seem to me non- 
starters. In the first place, I do not admit the 
claims of anyone who says, "There is such a 
thing as Beauty, because when a man says, 
'This is beautiful,' he does not mean, 'This is 
lovely,' or, 'This provokes the cosmic emotion.' 
There is such a thing as Art; because the sen- 
tence: 'Pictures, Poetry, Music, etc., are Art,' 
is not the same as 'Pictures, Poetry, JVIusic, etc., 
are Music, Poetry, Pictures k. t. x'" I am not 
concerned with what men may mean. They fre- 
quently mean and have meant the most astound- 
ing things. It is, possibly, true that when men 
say, "This is beautiful," they do not mean "This 
is lovely." They may mean that the assthetic 
emotion exists. My only comments are that it 
does not follow that the aesthetic emotion does 



THE THEATRE 19 

exist, and that, as a matter of fact, they are 
wrong. 

But the only way to prove them right or wrong 
is by introspection into our states of mind when 
we hear music or see pictures. 

It has been acutely said that, in philosophy, 
it is important to give the right answers, but even 
more important to ask the right questions. So 
here. Better than to ask "What is Art?" is it 
to ask "What do you feel before this picture?" 
"Before that picture?" "Is there anything com- 
mon between your feelings in these two cases?" 
"What do you feel in hearing this, and that, piece 
of music?" "Is there anything common?" and 
then, "Is there anything common between what 
you feel before all these pictures and what you 
feel in hearing all this music?" "And if so, what 
is it?" "Is it important?" One of the perils 
attending on those who ask the first question is 
that they tend, as all men do, to find what they 
are looking for: a common quality in Art. And 
also that they tend to exalt what they discover 
for this quality, above the others that are to be 
found in any of the arts. People who start in 
this way are apt to be, practically, a most in- 
tolerable nuisance both to critics and to artists; 
whether it is Art or any one art that they would 
tie to their rule. Art is Pattern; and a novel 



20 JOHN WEBSTER 

that lacks "pattern" is not Art, and therefore 
bad. Art is the perception of the individual 
case; so morality plays are illegitimate. Art is 
the emphasising of the generality; so Hamlet j, 
except in so far as the hero represents all neuro- 
paths, is a perverse and dovi^nward path from 
the moralities. Art must be moral; so Shake- 
speare's sonnets are what Hallam thought them. 
Art has no connection with morality ; so Paradise 
Lost and PilgriTris Progress are, artistically, 
worthless. A play must display a "develop- 
ment," a tragedy must involve a conflict; music 
must have a tune ; a picture may not tell a story. 
. . . The list of these perilous and presumptu- 
ous a priori limitations could go on for ever. Of 
the wrong ways of approaching the subject of 
"Art," or even of any one art, this is the worst 
because it is the most harmful. 

But there are other ways in which precon- 
ceptions and assumptions about the thing to be 
looked for mislead, in the consideration of Art. 
Croce rather naively begins by noting that "aes- 
thetic" has been used both for questions of Art 
and, in general and in accordance with its deriva- 
tion, for perception. So he sets out to discover 
what meaning it can really have, to apply to 
both. He takes it for the one necessary condi- 
tion a true answer about "Esthetics" must sat- 



THE THEATRE 21 

isfy, that it shall explain how Art and Percep- 
tion are both included. Having found such an 
explanation, he is satisfied. 

To take a different side, most of the uphold- 
ers of the Einfilhlungsdsthetik seem to have 
founded their view on the experiences of the spec- 
tator of certain visual arts, especially painting 
or architecture. In so far, it is valuable. But 
when it is contorted to cover the other arts, the 
result is ludicrous. So those who accept the 
Nacherleben theory, would appear to be extend- 
ing what is probably true about drama to spheres 
where it is desperately irrelevant. 

It is said that the figure of Helen, whom men 
have so eagerly followed and sought, was a 
phantasm, covered by which there lurked, in fact, 
a knot of mercantile interests of Greece and the 
Hellespont and the Black Sea; even as, some 
claim, men who have died for the love of Eng- 
land, or Germany, or Italy, have, in reality, 
only given themselves for a few rich people. Art 
and Beauty have proved such delusive Helens. 
It is an extraordinary crowd, pouring along di- 
verse roads, that has followed them. The on- 
looker is moved to amazement and derision. Ros- 
setti's *'View Halloo!" was less lonely than he 
dreamt. More than all illusory goddesses has 
My Lady Beauty been chased or stalked, as a 



22 JOHN WEBSTER 

rule passionately, often irretrievably, "in what 
fond flight, how many ways and days!" The 
ingenuity of the chase has been stupendous. 

"They sought her with thimbles, they sought her with care; 
They pursued her with forks and hope/' 

The thimble of an a priori generalisation has 
not closed down on My Lady, nor the fork of 
Dialectic impaled her. For the quest was vain 
from the beginning. It is that conviction that 
enables me so cursorily to leave such knight-er- 
rants to their task — of "bounding along on the 
tip of their tail" or "still clutching the inviola- 
ble shade," according to the way you regard 
them. We had best cultivate our gardens of 
the arts. Then we may turn round one day to 
discover Beauty at our elbow — if she exists at 
all. If she doesn't, we shall at least have learnt 
horticulture. 

I can descend, then, with a clear conscience 
to occupy myself with the single plots of ground 
called Drama and Tragedy. But first I must 
deal with two other ways of approaching the 
question of the arts — for the arts, as human 
activities, can be classed together, even though 
there be no such obvious similarity discernible 
in the states of mind they produce, no "aesthetic 
emotion." There are some who would view it 



THE THEATRE 23 

all from the point of view of the artist. "Art," 
they say, "is primarily a creative function of the 
artist; other people may profit, afterwards, if it 
so happens. Cricket is a game played by twen- 
ty-two men, under certain rules: which may or 
may not be watched by a crowd. This is true, 
even though the game would not have been 
played but for the crowd. Art is no more to be 
explained in terms of the chance result on the 
spectators than cricket is to be explained in 
terms of the feelings of the crowd. Art is an 
amazing creative experience of the artist: what 
happens to the result of his travail is neither here 
nor there. A good picture is one in the creating 
of which the artist had a good state of mind. 
And the utmost a spectator can hope for is to 
approximate, in beholding a work of art, to the 
state of mind the artist had in creating it." 

The last sentence, perhaps, expresses a view 
that need not logically go with the foregoing 
belief. For the whole position, I do not think 
it can, ultimately, be refuted. It becomes a 
question of words, or of the point of view. From 
where I stand, I seem to see certain activities, 
and I consider them according to the aspect that 
seems to me most important. If another man 
views and describes them from behind, I can only 
lament it. There are things to be said against 



24 JOHN WEBSTER 

him. Certainly, if importance is to weigh in the 
matter, the effects on the audience are more im- 
portant than the state of the artist. He could, 
cogently, answer that corn is corn, though the 
most important thing about it is that it goes to 
make bread. A greater difficulty is the extraor- 
dinary variety of experience of the creative 
artist. Blake thought he was taking down his 
writings from the dictation of an angel. Some 
writers solemnly think their things out. Others 
are "inspired"; or proceed almost by automatic 
writing. Some are highly excited and irrespon- 
sible; others detached, cynical, and calculating. 
Many artists, it would seem, are never aware 
of their work of art as a whole, but build it up, 
patching and revising in little pieces. A play 
by Beaumont and Fletcher, with the scenes ap- 
portioned out, would be difficult to judge by this 
creative theory. Certainly, if you take the case 
of a dancer, who can never quite see herself danc- 
ing, it seems clear that the important whole con- 
nected with this activity is in the state of mind 
of the spectator. 

Another common tendency, a fatal and ridicu- 
lous one, is that of the historical school. Both 
the psychology of the artist and the history of 
the arts are interesting, and may be valuable, 
topics of investigation. But it should be clearly 



THE THEATRE 25 

recognised that the history of the forms of the 
arts has no direct connection with the arts as they 
are. Football originated in a religious ritual; 
but it is not, necessarily, religious. The cooking 
of roast pork arose from the burning of a house ; 
but he would be a foolish gastronomist who, in 
considering cooking, laid great emphasis on the 
fundamental element of arson in that art. So 
there are some who say that the arts originated in 
a need to let off the superfluous energies of man, 
not needed to further or secure his livelihood; 
and therefore are essentially of the nature of 
play. Others declare that the sexual instinct 
was at the bottom of the beginnings of the arts, 
and that all Art is, fundamentally, sexuality. 
Others again would, for similar reasons, find it 
a religious activity. To all such we can only 
reply, "If your historical analysis is true, it is 
indeed a wonderful world in which we live; but 
now, in 1912, poetry and football are not sex 
or religion; they are poetry and football." 

There are theatres; places where you see 
things. The things you see there generally try 
to represent or imitate reality, and are frequently 
accompanied by words, in which cases they are 
called "plays." One of the first and most im- 
portant distinctions between plays, music, and 
poetry on the one hand, and pictures and sculp- 



26 JOHN WEBSTER 

ture on the other, is that the element of duration 
enters into the first group. There is no especial 
point in a picture at which you begin or end look- 
ing at it; no fixed order of sensations. There is 
just the picture. But the order of sensations 
which a play should arouse in you is fixed be- 
forehand, and essential. This fact of duration 
gives theatrical art two features. It can arouse 
all the emotions that can be got through the con- 
secution of events; and it can employ the suc- 
cession of emotions in the mind. Both these 
are important. Take the latter first. It is obvi- 
ous that, though he may demand certain knowl- 
edge in the spectator before the beginning of the 
play, the artist cannot demand any definite state 
of mind. He can only claim to be presented with 
an expectant and fairly blank normal mind. 
After that he is responsible. And at any moment 
during the play, his choice of the emotions to 
arouse is conditioned by the emotions already 
aroused. Each situation must be planned, each 
line written, with regard to the effect of what has 
gone before, not only logically, but psychologic- 
ally, on the audience. The continuity of the play 
must be an emotional continuity, even more than 
a rational one: not necessarily, of course, the 
same emotion continuously, but necessarily har- 
monious ones. I do not mean to suggest that the 



THE THEATRE 27 

spectator of a play experiences a number of defi- 
nite emotions, one at a time, each lasting three 
seconds, consecutive. His state of mind is com- 
plex; and while some perceptions or emotions 
flash with infinite swiftness through it, others last 
and colour the contents of subsequent states of 
mind for some time. It is these last that are 
most important, but the whole mental and emo- 
tional experience has a cumulative effect. It is 
as if a stream of water of various heat was trick- 
ling through a basin. The heat of the water in 
the basin at any moment would be affected by 
the heat of the basin, which in turn would be 
a result of the past heats of all the water that 
had gone through before. Only, heat is simple, 
and the succession of emotions and sensations is 
manifold and complex. The merit and kind of 
the play, in a sense the play itself, lie in the whole 
curve of these states of mind. That is the most 
important thing about plays, to w^hich every- 
thing, ultimately, must be referred. I can more 
easily imagine a play good in which all the char- 
acters of the first four acts vanished, and entirely 
new ones came on in the fifth, with an entirely 
new plot, so long as the emotions aroused were 
harmonious, than one in which the successive 
states of mind clashed. 

What a man generally refers to when he 



28 JOHN WEBSTER 

speaks of a play, and of the goodness and quali- 
ties of it, is a memory of this succession of states 
of mind, a kind of foreshortened view of it, an 
emotional precis or summary. A good critic is 
he who can both feel a play perfectly at the time, 
and sum up its particular taste and intensity 
perfectly, for his own reference, in this retro- 
spective summary. The process of summarising 
a play thus involves the abstraction of various, 
more or less common elements of the successive 
states of mind the play produces, and the con- 
cocting them into one imagined taste or state of 
mind, "the play." All these summaries are of 
something the same kind; so the habit of think- 
ing of plays thus leads men to think that there 
is some common quality in all of them — at least, 
in all serious ones — "beauty" and a common "ges- 
thetic emotion" always in the mind of all spec- 
tators of plays. I believe that honest introspec- 
tion of one's states of mind during a play, will 
show that there is no one quality one can call 
"beauty" in all successful serious plays. If there 
is any meaning at all in the word "beauty," my 
emotion at lago's temptation of Othello, or 
Lear's "Prithee, undo this button," is in no way 
a consciousness of beauty; and though there is, 
perhaps, something in my state of mind — the 
shape of it, so to speak — which is the same when 



THE THEATRE 29 

I watch any tragedy, it is only due, I think, to 
the fact that all tragedies I know have a certain 
common quality of being partly like life; I do 
not find this something in my mind when I am 
watching pure dancing. 

A play is good in proportion as the states of 
mind during the witnessing of it are, in sum, 
good. The good of these states of mind is, in 
practice, very much dependent on the pleasur- 
ableness of them, and proportionate to it. Much 
more so than in real life, where the consciousness 
of virtue makes some unpleasant states good. 
But pleasure is not a perfect criterion of good, 
even in the theatre. For a performance that pro- 
vokes lust would move pleasant states of mind, 
but not good ones. 

If this is granted, the difficulty is: in whom 
is a play to move good states of mind, in order 
to be called good? Obviously, not only in me. 
A play in Russian might be very good, and yet 
only bore me, because I couldn't understand it. 
On the other hand, I do not think it fair to call 
a play good which can be understood by nobody 
but the author. Everybody is familiar, in the 
realm of literature, with the writer who is im- 
mensely pleased with his own poem because of 
the emotions it evokes in him. The phrase "the 
sun is setting" recalls to him the purple and 



30 JOHN WEBSTER 

green glory that moved him to this inadequate 
expression. But it will not affect anyone else in 
the same way, so we rightly refuse to call the 
poem good. Obscurity in an author isi, ulti- 
mately, a fault. A family of my acquaintance 
uses a private and peculiar synonym of their 
own childish invention for "hand," the word 
"nopen." ^ If one of them wrote a poem con- 
taining this word, it would affect him very much, 
because of the aura of associations around it. 
But the rest of the world would find it mean- 
ingless. It would not be a good poem. One is 
reduced to saying that a good play means a play 
that would be likely to stir good states of mind 
in an intelligent man of the same nation, class, 
and century as the author. It follows that a 
good Elizabethan play is a play that would have 
been good in Elizabethan times; and not a play 
that is good to us, with our different ideas. The 
two categories coincide to a great extent. But 
their differences are important. 

And it follows that all those literary qualities 
that answer to patine in works of art — quaint- 
ness, old-fashionedness, interest as illustrating a 
bygone age — are irrelevant. I had rather read 
an interesting book originally worthless, than a 
fine poem in a language I cannot understand. 

* Because it opens. 



THE THEATRE 31 

But it would be misleading to call the former a 
better book. 

Whether the states of mind produced by a 
play were good or not, must be decided by intro- 
spection. The object of most critical enquiries 
is to discover what sort of effect different things 
in the theatre have on these states of mind. It 
is obvious if one examines one's consciousness 
during a play, that several different classes of 
object fill and move it. There is sound. Music, 
or the mere melody of words, impresses and 
pleases. There is the further literary pleasure of 
the language, apart from the mere sense; and 
sometimes there is metre. There is movement, 
varying from absolute dancing to mere imitation 
of life. There is, in most theatrical perform- 
ances, the story. And there is the realism of the 
piece ; i.e, its value as impressing us with the sense 
of its reality. 

If we exclude pure dancing, all performances 
in theatres have some value as connected with 
reality. To discover what it is, one has to con- 
sider one of the widest and most important psy- 
chological questions connected with the theatre, 
the question of convention. 

To say that one feels the reality of an ordinary 
play without believing it, is a fairly accurate de- 
scription of one's attitude. It would be better 



32 JOHN WEBSTER 

to put it in this way: the feeling of reality, the 
emotion of conviction, of faith, is a purely psy- 
chological one. It is this that plays aim at pro- 
ducing. It is not the same emotion we have in 
real life. In real life one does not feel "He is 
really there, talking to me!" One takes it for 
granted. He is there. This is also present to 
some degree when one is witnessing a play, but 
it is the negative and less valuable side of the 
emotion. The former, the positive feeling of 
reality, does not tend to result in action. The 
latter does permit of various emotions resulting 
in action. So there has to be a permanent inhi- 
bition of such action ; or, to put it in another way, 
you accept the convention of the actors, the 
absent fourth wall (on the modern stage), and 
so on. It was in the want of this inhibition that 
the wrongness of that Italian's attitude lay, who, 
at a performance of Hamlet^ was so wrought 
upon that he rose from his place in the pit, and 
shot Claudius. Many find it difficult to under- 
stand the attitude of the human mind about such 
convention. They either say, "Absence of scen- 
ery destroys the illusion," or "You must know 
it isn't true." The accepting of a convention 
means that one says, "Suppose Romans talked 

English blank verse, then " and gives oneself 

to the play; or, to put it another way, one puts 



THE THEATRE 33 

a lid on one's knowledge that Romans didn't talk 
English blank verse. Ignorant of that, one can 
believe the rest. 

This is one of the most natural and deep- 
rooted instincts in men. We do not want illu- 
sion; we only ask that conventions should be 
made and kept. But it is important that they 
should be kept. The artist can make any amount 
of conventions; but, once made, he must not 
break them. It is obvious in children. A grown- 
up can say, "Suppose you are a hen, and she is 
a steam-roller, and I am the King of Portugal," 
and they will carry the play out with entire ac- 
ceptance of this, absolute appreciation of the 
drama ensuing. But if the grown-up breaks 
from his regal speech and behaviour a moment 
to address a remark, in his own person, to some 
outsider or to the steam-roller in its private exist- 
ence, the grief and dismay of the children is 
prodigious and unexpected. Observation or 
memory will assure one that their pain is purely 
aesthetic. It is what we feel when a dramatist 
breaks or misuses one of the conventions. 

The artist's business, then, is to make these 
various conventions, and, within them, to impress 
the spectator as much as possible with the sense 
of reality. There are many ways of doing this; 
realism in any one one branch — in the chain of 



34 JOHN WEBSTER 

events, in the gestures of the actors, in the style 
of speech, in the truth to life of the characters, 
or in the scenery — ^will do to start the feeling of 
reality, and it will then gather force from the 
general power of the play. Or there are unreal- 
istic ways of impressing the spectator with real- 
ity, through mere literary or theatrical power. 
It is to be noticed that in some of these things, 
realism means breaking a convention and setting 
up a more realistic one, and is consequently com- 
parative. With speech, for example, realism 
means more realistic speech than one is accus- 
tomed to. Robertson's Caste was realistic in this 
direction, in its day. When we had got used to 
that, Mr. Shaw's plays, with their more natural- 
istic speech, appeared, and seemed to us more 
realistic. They, in their turn, ring now old- 
fashioned by the side of more modern plays, the 
dialogue of which seems to us, for a time, start- 
lingly and triumphantly like real life. 

If one keeps in mind the fact that the ultimate 
classification of plays, for aesthetic purposes, 
must be by the general tone of the states of mind 
they evoke, the endeavour to distinguish Trag- 
edy from Comedy, and to define Tragedy, by 
subject-matter, appears rather misleading. 
Tragedy may have to have a "hero," it may in- 
volve death, it may require a conflict. All we 



THE THEATRE 35 

know is that, in the two or three varieties of 
Tragedy we are acquainted with that have hith- 
erto been evolved, these things are generally- 
present. The duty of critics is rather to decide 
how far it is probable that a play with a hero will 
evoke deeper "Tragic" feeling than a play with- 
out one, and such half -technical and quantita- 
tive questions. 

The emotions of a spectator are produced in 
various ways, and through the two channels of 
the eye and ear. Performances can mix their 
appeals through these channels in any propor- 
tion. Pantomime can appeal, very powerfully, 
through the eye alone. A blind man could get 
a great deal of enjoyment out of some plays. 
But honest introspection will convince anyone 
that a very large part of the appeal made by a 
performance of the kind of play Hamlet or The 
Duchess of Malfi is, comes through the eye. 
Would one rather be blind or deaf at such a 
performance? It is a comprehensible and com- 
mon, but dangerous fault, to over-emphasise the 
importance of the printed text to the whole play. 
It is true that the romantic halo and additions of 
beauty to the general lines of the play, came, in 
Elizabethan plays, very little in the things you 
could look at ; almost entirely in the words. But 
the story itself was told visually as well as audi- 



36 JOHN WEBSTER 

bly. The Elizabethans were above all men of 
the theatre, and planned performances. It is 
important always to keep this in mind when read- 
ing their "plays," always to be trying to visualise 
the whole performance from the text, and to 
judge it so, and always to look with suspicion on 
those who judge the text as literature. It may 
be good literature, sometimes ; but it was not pri- 
marily that. To judge The Duchess of Malfi 
from the book of the words which we happen to 
possess is a little like judging a great picture by 
a good photograph of it. The general plan is 
given you, and you see all the lines, and shapes, 
and shading; and you have to supply the colour 
by an effort of the imagination. Much genuine 
sesthetic pleasure can be got from this; but no 
one would be so rash as to assume that, after 
that, he knew the picture. With plays, people 
are more presumptuous. But an honest man 
will sadly have to acknowledge that, in the text, 
we have only the material for a rough, partial, 
and hesitating appreciation of The Duchess of 
Malfi; and that this is the truer because it is an 
Elizabethan play, that is to say, it is written in 
a language somewhat different from ours, and 
pronounced differently too, and it was per- 
formed in conditions we do not completely know 
and cannot at all realise. It was composed for 



THE THEATRE 37 

an audience accustomed to the platform stage 
and no scenery; which we can never be. It was 
composed for the stage, and we judge it as liter- 
ature ; we are only readers. It is right enough to 
attempt to realise imaginatively Elizabethan 
plays as plays. It is right enough to admire 
their great literary merits and their rather acci- 
dental power as study-drama. But, after all, 
we have only the text — and that a not always 
trustworthy one — one factor of several in the 
play, a residue, fragments of the whole. We are 
like men who possess sweet-smelling shards of 
a jar which once held perfumes, and know how 
fragrant it must have been; but the jar is broken, 
and the perfumes lost. 



Chapter II 

THE ORIGINS OF ELIZABETHAN 

DRAMA 

It needs the imaginative sympathy of a good 
anthropologist to understand the real nature of 
the various progenitors of the Elizabethan 
drama; and it needs the intuition of a good psy- 
chologist to interpret it. Luckily much of the 
outer history, names, dates, and facts, together 
with a good deal of understanding explanation, 
has been given us by such writers as Professor 
Creizenach, and, above all, by Mr. Chambers. 
Subsequent works, such as The Cambridge His- 
tory of English Literature, merely follow on 
his lines, sometimes slightly varying relative im- 
portances, nothing more. But as one reads the 
array of facts and the brilliantly powerful gen- 
eralisations and inductions of Mr. Chambers, or 
the patient condensations of his successors, it is 
impossible not to feel the full sea of scepticism. 
Where we have records, do we really understand? 
It is hard enough, four-fifths of the books now 
written on them witness, not to be wholly out of 

38 



ORIGINS OF DRAMA 39 

touch with the Ehzabethans themselves. But 
they are our brothers and fathers. These others, 
these white-faced savages who seem to beckon 
and move in the fog of the Middle Ages or the 
deeper night behind — what have they to do with 
us? A surface likeness of name and tongue will 
not hide their foreignness. Their hearts are dif- 
ferent, and distant from ours. They live in an- 
other universe. The unconscious worshippers 
of a vegetation-god, the audience of a scopj the 
spectators of a miracle-play — what was really in 
their minds? We triumphantly know that the 
Feast of Fools was celebrated at Tournai on the 
eve of Holy Innocents, 1498, that an interlude 
was given at King's Lynn on Corpus Christi 
1385, that the processional religious drama was 
acted on "pageants," and so forth. But what 
were the people thinking, as the waggons rolled 
by or the actors came out? How like was it to 
an Elizabethan's feeling as he watched The 
Tragedy of Byron? or to ours when we see The 
Importance of Being Earnest? It is absurd to 
pretend we know. 

Such are the misgivings with which the honest 
student looks back on "the origins of the 
drama." He can pretend he sees how the "plat- 
form-stage" arose, and passed into the "picture- 
stage"; he can cheat himself into believing he 



40 JOHN WEBSTER 

has established the generations of an English 
dramatic form; but what, in our time and race, 
is the history of those complicated states of mind 
the witnessing of Hamlet breeds in us — that he 
dare only wonder. 

If he looks beyond the Middle Ages he finds 
at first more familiar things. Seneca's plays fall 
recognisable on his modern hearing; and if those 
were never on the stage, other tragedies and 
farces which we could, it is imaginable, under- 
stand, if not applaud, held the Roman ear. And 
the modern eye greets even more gladly finer, 
less recorded, performances. The best taste in 
Rome loved the intricate exquisite tragedies of 
the x€t/ooo"o<^oi> the dancers. We glibly call 
them, allow literary people to call them, the 
decadent successors of the drama. They may, 
we can believe now, have awoken passionate 
ecstasies of emotion, beyond our dreams; but 
they could not be handed down. These "choreo- 
drames" have perished. So we comfortably fall 
in with the assumption of those who practise 
literature, that drama, that queer and monstrous 
birth, is the God of the theatre. Literary people 
are very kind to each other; and all-powerful 
over civilisation. Through them come our his- 
tory, facts, ideas, and arguments; and so our 
valuations. We see all things through their 



ORIGINS OF DRAMA 41 

mists. The feet of the dancers throb "No !", their 
heads jerk argument and dialectic to us; we do 
not heed. We have read of Talfourd, and he will 
outlive Taglioni. The other arts present them- 
selves naked, to be accepted as they are. Only 
literature continually weaves laurels, and is for 
ever crowning herself. 

But the arts had always an enemy, especially 
the arts of the theatre. The plays we know of 
and the dancing we ignore were equally threat- 
ened by religion, who brought with her the blind 
forces of asceticism and morality. Any emo- 
tional and absorbing view of the universe that 
throws the value of life over into the next world, 
naturally regards things of this world as means 
rather than ends. And so it always tends to com- 
bine with and use that deep instinct in human 
nature, the instinct to treat all things as means, 
which is called Puritanism. For eighteen hun- 
dred years, religion, when it has been strong 
enough, has persecuted or starved the arts. At 
times, when it has grown shallow, it has allowed 
a thin subservient art to flourish beneath it; an 
art that, ostensibly educating men to be in some 
way useful, for this life or the next, couldn't help 
treating them, for a stolen moment, as ends. 
Such, perhaps, was the pictorial art of the Mid- 
dle Ages in Italy. But in general the arts have 



42 JOHN WEBSTER 

been kept pretty well under, especially the arts 
of the theatre, creeping slowly out when religion 
has slept, as in the eighteenth century, or some- 
times liberated by such splendid bursts of irre- 
ligion as produced the Elizabethan drama in 
England. 

The early fathers of the Church embodied the 
spirit of religion, knew the Will of God, as 
clearly in this as in most matters. It is amusing 
to see that Arius alone went so far as pleading 
for even a Christian theatre. Here, too, he was 
a lonely light. All the orthodox makers of Chris- 
tianity were venomous against spectacula. Like 
children saving up for one great treat. Chris- 
tians were consoled by Tertullian for the loss of 
theatres in this world, by the promise of the 
future spectacle of the exquisite and eternal suf- 
fering or richly comic writhing of play-actors 
and dramatists. The forces of evil triumphed. 
And the theatre was lost more swiftly and com- 
pletely than the rest of civilisation, when the 
double night of barbarism and Christianity set- 
tled down over Europe. 

The long, long rebirth of the Theatre was a 
process of roughly the same kind in nearly all 
European countries. But at present I am chiefly 
concerned with England. For this country the 
forces that led to the reappearance of theatrical 



ORIGINS OF DRAMA 48 

art and the drama are generally divided into four 
groups. There were the various travelling min- 
strels and entertainers; the folk-festivals and 
folk-plays; the religious drama; and the influ- 
ence of the classics. The relative importance of 
some of the earlier fountains of the English 
drama has been mistaken, through false psychoU 
ogy. Great weight is always laid on the various 
popular festivals and games, and the unconscious 
relics of old religions. They are said to be ex- 
amples of the beginning of mimetic art. If peo- 
ple find a participant in a May-festival taking 
the name of "The Queen," or a member of a 
dance assuming a personality with the name of 
"Ginger-breeches," they stretch delighted fin- 
gers, crying, "The origins of drama!" It is an 
error. It is not true that "the practice which 
lies at the root of dramatic art and of the pleas- 
ure to be gained from it" is "that of pretending 
to be someone or something else." ^ That is 
merely what lies at the root of being an actor; 
and only one of the things even there, as anyone 
who has known amateur actors can testify. As 
such, it is but one of the human instincts which, 
as it happens, enable us to satisfy our love for 
seeing drama. It has no more to do with "the 
pleasure to be gained from dramatic art" than 

* C. H. E. L., vol. v., p. 28. 



44 JOHN WEBSTER 

the desire for fame which made Keats write, or 
the desire for expression which made Wagner 
compose, have to do with poetry or music. They 
are conditions; at the most, indispensable condi- 
tions. The point of an art is in the state of mind 
of the recipient. 

"The poet sings because he must; 
We read because we will." 

Certain pleasant and valuable states of our minds 
when we see it, are what distinguishes dramatic 
art. Only such causes as produced them, or 
earlier forms of them, are directly relevant to a 
history of the drama or the theatre. Folk-games 
and festivals, and even folk-drama, have, there- 
fore, it seems to me, nearly no relevance to the 
history of the English drama. 

What is much more important is, of course, 
the religious drama. Religion, incessantly and 
half-consciously hostile to the arts, has inces- 
santly and half-consciously fostered them. 
Every activity of the mind of man is both end 
and means; and it is as impossible for religion 
to confine art to be useful, as it is for the pure 
"hedonist" to make it merely an end. When the 
first moralist discovered that by putting his ad- 
vice into a rhymed couplet he interested and im- 
pressed the people more, he opened the flood- 



ORIGINS OF DRAMA 45 

gates. There soon came along somebody who 
thought more of the jingle than of the morality. 
The moralist was powerless to prevent him. 
Thence follow Martial, Villon, English folk- 
songs, the Earl of Rochester's play, Baudelaire, 
and all the abominations of the holy. As the 
earliest Christian artist sought, in illustrating 
some incident from Christ's life, to enrich Truth 
with Beauty, the ghostly, unborn fingers of the 
Breughels and Felicien Rops guided his brush. 

So while Christianity was busily disinfecting 
the front hall, the most dreadful smells were 
starting again in the scullery. As early as the 
fourth century, before she was yet able to tri- 
umph completely in the defeat of the pagan 
theatre, the Church had begun to show forth part 
of the greatest drama in her universe, by repre- 
sentation, and with all the pomp and wonder of 
the highest dramatic art. Those who admit the 
existence of other varieties of theatrical art be- 
sides the entirely realistic, must recognise that 
the state of mind of the spectator of the JNIass is 
strongly aesthetic. Other elements enter, but they 
combine, not clash, with this. The fact the spec- 
tator thinks that what is being represented is 
true does not make the whole thing undramatic. 
It becomes a variety of drama, as portrait-paint- 
ing is a variety of pictorial art, but with less dis- 



46 JOHN WEBSTER 

cordant ends than the portraitist must try to 
serve. That the importance of the Mass is quite 
other than aesthetic is irrelevant. Considered in 
the light of the states of mind of the spectators 
of that time, the Mass must have been great 
drama as surely as Giotto's pictures of the life 
of Christ were great pictorial art. 

Other services and ceremonies of the Church 
followed in admitting more or less of drama. 
The history of them, the Quern quceritis trope and 
the rest, had been worked out and often related. 
The progress from few to many occasions for 
gratifying the theatrical instinct in men was in- 
evitable. More elaborate as well as more numer- 
ous, as the centuries went on, grew the liturgical 
dramas. They soon began to be transported out- 
side the churches; finally to be played by lay- 
men. More and more scenes from the Bible and 
from legend were dramatised and performed. 
They became definitely amusing and interesting 
for the people, quite apart from the lessons 
they might teach. Bather too much stress has 
been laid, naturally, on the great cycles, of Ches- 
ter, York, Coventry, and elsewhere, that have 
survived. The accident of their existence must 
not make us forget that, in church and out, espe- 
cially out, there were innumerable miracle and 
mystery plays continually being played through 



ORIGINS OF DRAMA 47 

England in the two or three hundred years be- 
fore Elizabeth. Every little town and village 
seems to have had them. They were the ordinary 
food of the theatrical instincts of the people. We 
cannot understand them now — what there is left. 
They are far from our ideas of drama, and by 
our standards they fail. We can see that some 
of the episodes were funny, that others had 
pathetic or tragic value, or a queer vitality of 
characterisation. But the whole seems incoher- 
ent, disjointed, and "inartistic." Careful writers 
go through them, picking out bits of "realistic 
humour" in one place, and "true literary feeling" 
in another. It is meaningless; a prattling rela- 
tion of which parts of these plays appeal to a 
twentieth century professor. What did those 
curious medisevals feel when they were watching 
them? We cannot tell. They may have had as 
profound and passionate emotions as a play of 
Ibsen's stirs in us. But as we do not know we 
cannot affirm that this mediaeval drama was good 
or bad; any more than we can for the Greek 
drama. Which of the two, for instance, was the 
greater? It is like a deaf mute having to judge 
whether Strauss or Mozart is the greater opera- 
maker. Judging from the librettos, and from 
watching conductors, he might guess that Strauss 
was more interesting, Mozart more melodious. 



48 JOHN WEBSTER 

. . . He could play with inferences. ... So 
(whatever may be claimed by Greek scholars) 
must we confess almost complete ignorance about 
the mediseval drama. Some things can be said. 
It was certainly narrow; and it cannot have had 
those qualities of concentration and "dramatic 
unity," that are necessary for great dramatic art 
as we are used to know it. But I think there 
may have been, to the contemporary, more con- 
nection and significance in many of these series 
of plays than the modern will allow. Or rather, 
the modern sometimes will admit it intellectually, 
but he does not realise it emotionally. I can 
conceive the mediaeval mind (the exceptional 
mediaeval mind, I admit, for the ordinary childish 
one must have viewed scene after scene with that 
transient delight, on a background of reverence, 
with which schoolboys read Henry the Fourth — 
they find bits very interesting, and they know it's 
all for their education) tasting in each episode 
both the episode itself and the whole, in such a 
way that, finally, that whole loomed out pecu- 
liarly solid, majestic, and impressive. The mind 
would, from its ordinary bent of religious and 
moral thought, be prepared to receive the play 
(or cycle) in just this way; and the whole thing 
would fall into these predestined mental channels 
with immense accumulating force and power. 



ORIGINS OF DRAMA 49 

Just as the Agamemnon was meant for, had its 
significance for, a mind naturally thinking in 
terms of rySpt? and aT?;; so, perhaps, a medigeval 
series of plays could only find their value in a 
mind thinking naturally and immediately in 
terms of the whole Biblical story, theologically 
interpreted. To the Greek mind the rugs laid 
down for Agamemnon trailed clouds of horror; 
to the mediaeval the incident of Cain and Abel 
may have suggested straightly and sincerely, in 
a way we could never feel it, the entire ancestry 
of Christ, or the meaning of a later greater sacri- 
fice, and may have illuminated and caught light 
from the whole tremendous process of the work- 
ing out of the Will of God. I do not know if 
the mediaeval cycles consciously tried to produce 
an effect of this kind, or if they ever succeeded, 
enough to make them worthy, in their narrow 
kind, to stand by the great dramatic products of 
other styles and other ages. I only suggest that, 
sesthetically, they may have been of this nature. 
It is a method, this subordinating the parts to the 
whole, in such a way that the parts have no neces- 
sary connection with each other except through 
the whole, that is strange to us who are used to 
"plots" that centre about one incident or situa- 
tion, or one or two characters. In it Time or Fate 
is the protagonist. It might have, but never did, 



50 JOHN WEBSTER 

come off in those dreary chronicle-plays, that 
increase the desolation of the early Elizabethan 
drama. It is a method that has been used in 
later days with greater success. Wagner in The 
Ring gets something of this effect. And Hardy 
in The Dynasts and Schnitzler in Der Junge 
Medardus have used these apparently discon- 
nected, episodic scenes, with or without commen- 
tary, for a resultant whole as different from 
them as a face is from its parts, nose, eyebrows, 
ears and the rest. They show you a street-scene, 
some friends, two lovers — all irrelevant — and 
you know Vienna of 1809. Or they pick out, 
perhaps, and light up, a few disconnected objects 
on the stream of time, and you are suddenly, ter- 
ribly aware of the immense black unreturning 
flood, sliding irrevocably between darknesses. 

Such a method, however, if it existed in 
mediaeval times, did not influence the Elizabethan 
drama. The disconnected narrative form was in- 
deed an Elizabethan inheritance from mediaeval 
religious drama; but merely as narrative. The 
narrative was transferred from sacred subjects 
to historical ; the line is pretty clear. The chron- 
icle-plays, indeed, appear to be artistically a 
retrogression. In incidents and in the whole 
they are more pointless. The loose narrative 
style, the limber and many- jointed acts, and the 



ORIGINS OF DRAMA 51 

habit of bringing everything on the stage, lasted 
in the plays of the great period — the beginning 
of the seventeenth century. Besides this, the mir- 
acle and mystery plays gave little to the Eliza- 
bethan drama. They handed on the possibility 
of tragedy and comedy; but that gift was not 
needed. They bequeathed, too, a certain rather 
admirable laxity and vagueness with regard to 
locality in drama; and a tiresome, confusing 
tendency to make plays illustrate a moral, a ten- 
dency which fitted in only too well with the 
theory of Elizabethan times; less, fortunately, 
with its practice. 

These miracles and mysteries in their various 
forms lasted, in country parts at least, to over- 
lap with the Elizabethan drama. But there was 
another form of the religious play which actually 
formed the chief link with the later style, the 
morality. It was a late growth, and it rather 
superseded the miracles and mysteries. It was 
aided, though not originated, by the revival of 
learning and moral fervour that followed the 
Renascence and accompanied the Reformation; 
and, coming at this time, it soon widened from 
merely religious ideas to all kinds of secular in- 
tellectual notions. It is distinctly of the age 
of Protestantism, and so we can understand it, 
better at least than its predecessors, in the same 



52 JOHN WEBSTER 

way that we can understand Erasmus. It deals 
less with God and more with man and the ab- 
stractions that were thought to surround his life. 
By such strange ways the arts came home. 
Moralities and moral interludes, in their turn, 
could have produced ( and did produce in Every- 
man at least) great drama in their kind. But 
again, it was a narrow kind. Had that tide 
flowed on unchecked, we might now look back 
on an immense English Drama of types and 
personifications, a noble utterance, in this nar- 
row sort, of all the human desires and dreams 
and interpretations of life for centuries. The 
crown and glory of the English theatre would 
have been Milton — Comus, even now, is, in dis- 
guise, the most noble example of morality. We 
might have achieved the most solemn and noble 
drama of the world — a nobility astonishingly dif- 
ferent from the glory we have achieved, its direct 
opposite. For the transformation of the moral- 
ity into the Elizabethan play was a complete re- 
versal of direction. The whole point of the 
former is that it deals with the general; you 
find all your experience drawn together and illu- 
minated; you are pervaded, rather than shaken, 
with the emotion of the philosopher who sees the 
type through the individual. Love beneath the 
lover. The latter gives you the particular; some 



ORIGINS OF DRAMA 53 

definite person or circumstance so poignantly 
that you feel it; the reality for those vaporous 
abstractions, not Love but William in love, not 
Death but some fool, rather untidily, dying. The 
one shows you Everyman, the other Hamlet. 
Each way is good; but to go from one to the 
other, is as if English art twenty-five years ago 
had suddenly swung from Watts to Whistler. 

Those who are fond of comparing epochs in 
history with stages in the life of a man will be 
pleased to liken the mediaeval miracles and mys- 
teries to the narratives that delight children, the 
period of the moralities to that invariable love 
of youth for generalities and proverbial wisdom 
— for Love, Death, Fate, Youth, and all the 
wonderful heart-lifting abstractions — and in the 
Elizabethan's climb to that chief abode of art, 
the heart of the individual, they will find the 
middle-aged turning, with the strength as well 
as the bitterness of agnosticism, to all that one 
can be certain of, or, after a bit, interested in, 
men, women, places, each as a "special case." 
But if the moralities are taken on their own 
merits and not as a step in a process, it is doubt- 
ful whether they are, artistically, an advance on 
miracles and mysteries. Dodsley's point, that 
they were a better kind, as giving the author 
greater freedom, enabling him to invent his plots, 



54 JOHN WEBSTER 

has been often repeated. There is not much in 
it. The Greeks and most of the Elizabethans did 
not, in that sense, "invent" their plots. In the 
Christian stories and legends the greatest drama- 
tist could have found enough to last him a life- 
time. Any old story does for the framework of 
a play. The moralities, in fact, in putting the 
dramatist to the trouble of inventing a "plot," 
rather tended to divert his attention from more 
important things. In other ways, however, they 
did widen the ground for the dramatist; and in 
making plays more wholes and less narratives, 
and insisting on dramatic unity, they prepared 
very efficiently for the Ehzabethan kinds of 
drama. It might, indeed, have been better if their 
legacy of dramatic unity had been more strictly 
observed. Their other characteristic, of thinking 
in types and abstractions, instead of individuals, 
had a longer influence, of no very healthy kind, 
than is at first obvious. Dr. Faustus is only 
Everyman, or at least Every-philosopher, with 
a name and a university degree. And there was 
also a moralising effect; which is not quite the 
same thing. An art which proceeds by personi- 
fications of abstract ideas need not moralise, 
though in this instance it nearly always did. A 
modern morality in which the characters were 
Evolution, The-Survival-of-the-Fittest (his 



ORIGINS OF DRAMA 55 

comic servant), Man, and the various Instincts, 
might be very impressive without conveying any 
moral at all. The Elizabethan drama, however, 
started with the burden of this idea among 
others, that a play rather ought to specify a 
moral generalisation. It took some time to shake 
it off. 

The third more or less dramatic activity 
through the Middle Ages was provided by the 
minstrels and strolling entertainers of various 
kinds. The ancesters of these were on the one 
hand the actors of Rome, the miini, who, when 
the theatres ceased, took to w^andering about and 
giving entertainments, and on the other the more 
reputable and probably less dramatic Teutonic 
scop. These minstrels were a great feature of 
the whole mediseval period, but their importance 
in the history of the theatre has always been 
under-estimated. There are two reasons, I think. 
One is that their performances have left very lit- 
tle record. The history of religious drama can 
be traced fairly fully. Minstrels of all kinds 
may have been giving unceasing dramatic enter- 
tainments throughout Europe during the same 
centuries. We have nothing to say about it. 
There are no traces to investigate, no written 
text of the performances to comment on. So, as 
we continually hear of the religious perform- 



56 JOHN WEBSTER 

ances and never of these others, we insensibly 
grow to attach great importance to the former 
and to omit the latter altogether in our view. 
The second reason lies in the error in psychology 
I have discussed. It is supposed that, while any 
band of rustics dressing up is relevant to the his- 
tory of drama, no entertainment given by min- 
strels is, unless it is full-blown realistic acting. 
I think that careful consideration of the imagined 
states of mind of a mediaeval, or indeed of a 
modern, audience, will show that the theatrical 
emotion begins far before that. Even a single 
minstrel reciting a tragic story seems to me 
nearer to evoking it than many apparently more 
* 'mimetic" activities. And directly he introduces 
any representation or imitation — as reciters 
always tend to do — drama is, in embryo, there. 
I think it is certain that a single performer can 
produce all the effects of drama, by represent- 
ing, conventionally, several characters in turn. 
Mile. Yvette Guilbert does it. You get from 
her the illusion of seeing, with extraordinary 
insight and vividness, first the prisoner of 
Nantes, and then the gaoler's daughter, quite as 
much as you would in an opera. The thing can 
go further. I myself have seen a mere amateur 
represent at one time and in his one person two 
lame men, each lame in a different way, walking 



ORIGINS OF DRAJVIA 57 

arm-in-arm, with almost complete realism. And 
when it comes to dialogues and estiifs between 
two or more performers, it seems to me absurd 
pedantry, a judging by forms instead of realities, 
to deny the presence of drama. 

In any case, the mimi went into the darkness, 
at the end of Rome, performing plays; and the 
same class reappears, performing plays, as soon 
as we can discover anything about them, cen- 
turies later. The influence of the farces these 
wanderers were playing towards the end of the 
middle ages, on early English comedy, is more 
or less recognised. I think it is very probable 
they had a great influence also on tragedy and 
on drama as a whole. Some of them, it is known, 
used to perform puppet-plays wherever they 
went. The importance of these in keeping drama 
and the taste for tragedy and comedy alive in 
the hearts of the people is immense. These 
strolling professional entertainers took their part 
also in other kinds of dramatic performances. 
We find them helping in folk-plays and festi- 
vals; and when the religious plays were secular- 
ised, they often appear as aiding the amateurs. 
Indeed, the "interlude," the favourite dramatic 
form which develops out of the secularised relig- 
ious plays, and which led straight to the Eliza- 
bethan drama proper, fell largely into the hands 



58 JOHN WEBSTER 

of the "minstrels." About that time they were 
reinforced, and rivalled, by the various local com- 
panies of actors who began touring in a semi- 
professional way. They were also strengthened 
during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries by 
being enrolled in the service of various great 
lords. Under both popular and aristocratic cir- 
cumstances these professionals, after severe com- 
petition with amateurs during the first part of 
the sixteenth century, settled, some of them, into 
theatres, and became the actors of the Eliza- 
bethan drama. Their importance in this light is 
obviously very great. But their true position can 
be guessed by inspecting Mr. Chambers' appen- 
dices of mediaeval plays and Mr. Tucker Mur- 
ray's more recent researches. It was they that 
were responsible for continual dramatic perform- 
ances of every kind throughout England. How 
good or bad these were we cannot tell. The 
forces of religion opposed them, with varying 
vigour at different periods, and probably suc- 
ceeded in degrading them to a low level. But 
they must have prepared the mind of the people 
to expect certain things in tragedy or comedy; 
and they may account for various aspects of 
Elizabethan plays that neither the religious nor 
the classical influence explains. 

By the middle of the sixteenth century, then. 



ORIGINS OF DRAMA 59 

the drama was in an inchoate condition. Inter- 
ludes of all kinds, moral, religious, controversial, 
and farcical, were being played by all sorts of 
audiences, besides the rough beginnings of popu- 
lar tragedy and comedy, and many survivals of 
the old religious plays. In the sixties the real 
Elizabethan drama began; and one of the chief 
influences in working the change was the classical 
one. It came from above, and from amateurs. 
It was started, it is noteworthy, by people with 
a fixed, conscious, solemn, artistic aim. They 
wanted to have tragedies in the real classical way ; 
so they imitated, queerly enough, Seneca ! Eng- 
lish literature has always been built on a rever- 
ent misunderstanding of the classics. Anyhow, 
anyone is good enough to be a god. The worst 
art has always been great enough to inspire the 
best. The iron laws of heredity do not affect 
literature; and Seneca may father Shakespeare 
as Macpherson fathered the Romantic Move- 
ment. 

The dates of the Senecan movement in Italy, 
France, and England have been elaborately 
worked out. They do not concern us now. The 
influence of Seneca, and, vaguely, what was 
thought to be the classical tradition, in accord- 
ance with the misunderstood laws of Aristotle, 
came primarily by two streams, through Italy 



60 JOHN WEBSTER 

and France. Tancred and Gismunda was influ- 
enced by the Italian Senecans; Kyd translated 
Garnier. Italy, of course, the romantic home 
of all beauty and art, had the most influence. But 
culture came from France. The English began 
translating Seneca for themselves in the sixties 
and seventies. As far as can be seen, the posi- 
tion in the eighties, when Marlowe and Kyd were 
about to fling English tragedy as we know it 
shouting into the world, was that the popular 
stage was scarcely touched at all by this classical, 
Senecan movement ; the children's companies and 
ordinary court plays were only partly and patch- 
ily afl*ected; but private performances in the 
Inner Temple and Gray's Inn had proudly and 
completely adopted the Senecan (or, generally, 
classical) style. As these were often given be- 
fore the Queen, they had great influence in 
spreading the impression that this type of trag- 
edy was the highest, the only type intellectual 
and cultivated people could aspire to. The Sene- 
can boom did not leave much directly to Eliza- 
bethan drama; far less than is generally made 
out. It left perhaps a ghost tradition, the much- 
advertised and over- valued "revenge motive," 
and the tendency to division into five acts. But 
indirectly it had value in tightening up the 
drama, pulling the scattered scenes which appeal 



ORIGINS OF DRAMA 61 

to the English, a httle, but not too much, into 
one play. And it was of vast use as an ideal. 
It enabled the dramatists to write for their audi- 
ences but above them. It set the audiences an 
aesthetic standard, shook them into artistic moral- 
ity. Left to itself, this movement would have, 
and did, become academic, cold, dead. But 
Fulke Greville, Alexander, even Ben Jonson, 
did not get the full benefit of it. The best of it, 
and the best of the popular stage, were torn out, 
combined, and revitalised by Kyd and Marlowe. 
Towards that the times were ripening. The 
drama was getting a standing, the first important 
step. It was at once popular and fashionable. 
And, though a few Puritan fanatics had started 
a protest, the main mass of the people were 
against them. That gradual depletion of the 
theatre-audiences which took place during the 
next century, when bourgeois democracy slowly 
became one with Puritanism, had not com- 
menced. The establishment of fixed theatres in 
London must have raised the level of the per- 
formances; and, the second important step, it 
was educating and preparing an audience. For 
an audience must be trained and trained together, 
as much as a troupe of actors. It is equally one 
of the conditions of great drama. 



Chapter III 

THE ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 

There are many ways of considering a subject 
like the Elizabethan drama. You can take the 
plays by authors. Naturally, it is one of the best 
ways ; and it is the only way that was employed 
up to quite recently. To use that method alone 
leads to queer blindnesses. And it is apt to end 
in the "our Shakespeare" business, an easy and 
unprofitable way of taking art. 

Then there is division by subjects, the method 
of Professor Schelling and of Polonius. This 
counteracts the evils of the first way; but it is 
often rather unmeaning: Measure for Measure 
gets grouped with the "Romantic Comedies." 
That is to say, the fault is in the unreality of the 
classes. They should rather be grouped by taste. 
An arrangement under purely fanciful names 
would be more practical. Love's Labour Lost 
would go with Lyly under "Court Butterfly"; 
Measure for Measure might jostle The Fawn or 
Hamlet in the "Brass-on-Tongue" sub-division 
of the "Leaves-a-Taste-in-the-Mouth" group. 

62 



THE ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 63 

And there is the reader's way. Lamb's way, 
of just picking out the best plays. It has a lot 
to be said for it. 

All three methods, and others, have their com- 
plemental merits. But I think the most useful 
way of surveying material like this is by a com- 
bination, in the following way. One should 
divide the plays, roughly chronologically, accord- 
ing to their style or taste, the general Stimmung 
of them, with a certain reference to authorship, 
and distinct emphasis on the merits and possibili- 
ties of the various styles. For though, of course, 
when you stop to consider any particular part, 
these questions of influence, "schools," styles, 
periods, and the rest, immediately sink into their 
proper subordination, yet, for a rapid survey, 
they do correspond to certain realities. It is 
important to know that a writer was aiming at a 
certain atmosphere, or influenced by it. And 
some of these atmospheres, and these aims, are 
much healthier for art than others. At any rate, 
I think that to explain what Webster's plays 
really are, it is necessary to show where they fit 
in with the rest of the Elizabethan drama. And 
as I do not know of any survey of this drama 
that seems to show the main outlines right, espe- 
cially with regard to comparative goodness — the 
scientific literary historian makes every play 



64 JOHN WEBSTER 

equally dull, the Swinburnian critic makes every 
author equally supreme — I shall try to give, very 
briefly, my own views. 

Soon after Lyly began to breathe into comedy 
(with which I am not concerned) a movement 
that was near to being life, and a prettiness that 
was still nearer beauty, Kyd and Marlowe blew 
life, strength, and everything else into tragedy. 
To say that they grafted the energy of popular 
tragedy on the form of classical, would be to 
wrong by a soft metaphor their bloody and vital 
violence. It was rather as if a man should dash 
two dead babies together into one strident and 
living being. Kyd, of course, does not really 
stand by Marlowe. But he seems further below 
him than is fair, because Marlowe's genius was 
more literary, and so lives longer. Both brought 
light and life to tragedy. Kyd filled Seneca's 
veins with English blood. He gave his audience 
living people, strong emotions, vendetta, murder, 
pain, real lines of verse, and, stiffly enough, the 
stateliness of art. He thrilled a torch in the 
gloom of the English theatre. Marlowe threw 
open a thousand doors, and let in the sun. He 
did it, in the prologue to Tamhurlainej, with the 
superb insolence and lovely brutality of youth. 
His love of the body, his passion for the world 
of colour and stuff, his glorious atheism, "giant- 



THE ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 65 

ism 'gainst Heaven," were trumpets in that 
morning. The blood still sings to them. Mar- 
lowe is less representative, stands clearer of his 
period, than almost any Elizabethan. He was 
of no school, had no followers. Others, Shake- 
speare, for instance, caught something of his 
trick of blank verse, or tried a play or two in 
his manner. But there was no body of drama 
that partook of the atmosphere of ferocious, 
youthful, passionate tragedy that distinguishes 
Marlowe's work. He stands rather, in his joy 
of the world, and irreligion, as the herald of the 
whole age, and of that short song of passion it 
could utter before the beginning of the night. 
His loneliness is explicable. It was not only 
that no contemporary was old and great enough 
to take all he had to give. But his dramatic 
method was unique. He was not a dramatist in 
the way the others were. He was — in this some- 
thing like the young Shakespeare, but far more 
so — a lyric writer using drama. "Plot" does not 
matter to him. Each scene he works up into an 
intense splendid lyric. They are of different 
kinds, but put together they have unity. The 
whole is a lyric drama. No one else, except, con- 
ceivably, Webster, in a slight degree, used this 
artistic method. Marlowe was an extreme poiri' 
tilliste. He produced his whole eiFect by very 



66 JOHN WEBSTER 

large blobs of pure colour, laid on side by side. 
The rest were ordinary semi-impressionists, with 
a tale to tell. Only Webster more than rarely 
achieved expressionism. 

One other gift Kyd and Marlowe, especially 
Marlowe, gave their contemporaries; blank 
verse. Before them was the Stone Age; they 
gave the poet a new weapon of steel. Marlowe 
was drunk on decasyllabics, the lilt and clang and 
rhetoric of them. How he must have shouted, 
writing each line of Tamhurlaine! It all fits in 
with the rest of this outburst of true great trag- 
edy in the eighties. But it was only an outburst 
of youth ; and the sentimentality and tediousness 
of youth had to be gone through before the best 
times could be won. The rest of the history of 
the drama during this century is mainly con- 
cerned with the histories and chronicles. Some- 
thing — it may have been the Spanish Armada — 
made the audiences demand this dreary kind of 
play. Their other cry (I have only space to dis- 
cuss the best audiences and plays) seems to have 
been for a slight kind of romantic comedy. They 
swallowed everything, of course, as at all periods 
of this eighty years. But these two types of 
play, were, perhaps, most prominent. 

Critics have always idiotically thought it their 
duty to praise these histories; partly because 



THE ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 67 

Shakespeare, in obedience to popular demand, 
wrote some; partly because they are supposed 
to exemplify the patriotism of the Elizabethans, 
and we are supposed to enjoy that patriotism. 
These chronicle-plays fit in, it is not very clear 
how, with Drake, Hawkins, and the rest of the 
"island story." And those numerous literary or 
dramatic critics who do not care for literature or 
the drama, nod their sentimental approbation. 
It sounds too fantastic for truth, but it is true, 
that the ultimate defence of Elizabethan drama 
offered by many writers on it, is that it holds up 
so faithful a glass to the "bustling, many-sided 
life of that wonderful time." Such wretched 
antiquaries beam mild approval on these new 
proofs of the Elizabethan's interest in his coun- 
try's history. 

It must be clearly decided that these histories 
were a transient, dreary, childish kind. They 
preserved the worst features of Elizabethan 
drama in their worst form; the shapelessness, the 
puerility, the obvious moralising, the succession 
of scenes that only told a narrative, the entire 
absence of dramatic unity, the mixture of farce 
and tragedy that did not come off*. I do not 
mean (for the moment) to say that the Eliza- 
bethan type of play was bad, as such; only that 
when done in this form it was silly and without 



68 JOHN WEBSTER 

value. One or two tragedies that were written 
in the form of histories are some good; Richard 
II and Edward II, And, of course, in his worst 
efforts Shakespeare always leaves touches of 
imagination and distinction. But as a whole 
these histories are utterly worthless. 

Something similar is the case with the romantic 
comedies. Neither in themselves, nor as a sign 
of the taste of the times, have they much value. 
Occasionally they achieve a sort of prettiness, the 
charm of a stage-spring or an Academy allegory 
of youth. And Shakespeare threw a pink magic 
over them. But it should be left to girls' schools 
to think that the comedies he obligingly tossed 
off exist in the same universe with his later 
tragedies. The whole stuff of this kind of play 
-^disguises, sentimentality, girls in boys' clothes, 
southern romance — was very thin. It might, 
perhaps, under different circumstances, have 
been worked up into exquisite, light, half -passion- 
ate comedy of a limited kind. It did not achieve 
even this success. 

There are one or two isolated good plays of 
indefinable genus, like A Midsummer Nighfs 
Dream, But on the whole this period of silliness 
or undistinguished prettiness between the great 
years of Marlowe {c, 1588) and the wonderful, 
sultry flower-time of the next century, is only 



THE ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 69 

redeemed by one kind of drama that was seri- 
ously trying to move serious artistic emotions. 
It is a kind that is despised by the refinement of 
modern criticism, condemned by the word 
"crude"; what is called "domestic tragedy." 
These indigenous plays, descendants probably of 
unknown myriads of popular tragedies in Eng- 
land, were nearly always dramatisations of re- 
cent occurrences. Some are bad, and all are as 
"crude" as life. But they kept people in touch 
with realities, with the brutality of blood and 
death. The theatre might so easily have gone 
irrevocably soft during these years. They kept 
it fit for the tragedy that was to come; and they 
profoundly influenced that tragedy for the eighty 
years of "Elizabethan drama." But it was at 
this time that they were especially common. The 
only long study of the subject ^ contains a list of 
the plays of this nature. There are twenty-four 
known; fourteen of them occur in the period 
1592-1603, two earlier, eight later. It is note- 
worthy that of the three best we know, one, 
Arden of Fever sham, comes at least at the begin- 
ning of the period, almost in Marlowe's time; 
the second, A Woman Killed with Kindness 

^ Das biirgerliche Trauerspiel in England. Singer. The list 
counts Arden of Feversham as 1592. It is probably earlier, 1586 
or so. 



70 JOHN WEBSTER 

(Heywood's best play), comes right at the end, 
in the golden years of the next century, and the 
third, A Yorkshire Tragedy, is generally dated 
as right in the middle of that great age, in 1605. 

For there was a period — 1600-1610 are the 
rough inside limits — ^that stood out an infinity 
above the rest. Nearly all the good stuff of 
Elizabethan drama was in it or of it. Except 
in comedy, there are only the lonely spring of 
Marlowe and the Indian summer of Ford out- 
side it. And it is not only that it was Shake- 
speare's great time. That is partly both cause 
and effect, and our great good fortune. 

The whole age, in drama and beyond, was alive 
with passion and the serious stuff of art. Nor 
was it only that so much of great merit was pro- 
duced in this short time. Nearly all the work of 
the period shared, apart from its goodness, in a 
special atmosphere. It is extremely important 
to recognise the absolute distinctness and su- 
preme greatness of this period, its sudden ap- 
pearance and its swift and complete end. There 
is only space here to hint at its characteristic 
features. It was heralded (poetry is generally 
a few years ahead of drama) by Shakespeare's 
sonnets, and the poems of Donne — who, in spite 
of Ben Jonson, did not write all his best things 
before 1598. Poets, and men in general, had 



THE ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 71 

reached a surfeit of beauty. The Renaissance 
joy in loveliness, the romantic youthfulness of 
the age, the wave of cheerful patriotism, all 
passed at the same time. Boyhood passed. Im- 
agination at this time suddenly woke to life. Its 
flights were to the strangest corners and the 
pitchiest barathrum of the deep. Intellect was 
pressed into the service of the emotions, and the 
emotions were beaten into fantastic figures by 
the intellect. The nature of man became sud- 
denly complex, and grew bitter at its own com- 
plexity. The lust of fame and the desire for 
immortality were racked by a perverse hunger 
for only oblivion; and the consummation of 
human love was observed to take place within 
the bright, black walls of a flea. It seemed 
as though all thought and all the arts at 
this time became almost incoherent with the 
strain of an inhuman energy within them, and a 
Titanic reaching for impossible ends. Poetry 
strove to adumbrate infinity, or, finding mysti- 
cism too mild, to take the most secret Kingdom 
of Heaven by storm. Imagination, seeking 
arcane mysteries, would startle the soul from its 
lair by unthinkable paradoxes. Madness was 
curiously explored, and all the doubtful coasts 
between delirium and sanity. The exultations of 
living were re-invigorated by the strength of a 



72 JOHN WEBSTER 

passionate pessimism ; for even scepticism in that 
age was fecund and vigorous, and rejoiced in the 
whirling gloom it threw over life. The mind, 
intricately considering its extraordinary prison 
of flesh, pondered long on the exquisite tran- 
siency of the height of love and the long decom- 
position that death brings. The most gigantic 
crimes and vices were noised, and lashed immedi- 
ately by satire, with the too-furious passion of the 
flagellant. For Satire flourishes, with Trag- 
edy, at such times. The draperies of refinement 
and her smug hierarchy were torn away from the 
world, and Truth held sway there with his ter- 
rific court of morbidity, scepticism, despair, and 
life. The veils of romanticism were stripped 
away: Tragedy and Farce stood out, for men 
to shudder or to roar. 

In a time so essentially healthy for all that is 
fine in man, and especially in his arts, it is no 
wonder that the best in a great many difl*erent 
styles was being done. But each of these bests 
has some trace of the spirit of the times. Chap- 
man, for instance, was doing his finest serious 
work. Bussy D'Amhois comes near the begin- 
ning of the period, the two Byron plays later on, 
The Revenge of Bussy at the end. Chapman is 
of the time in his intellect, but not in his emo- 
tions. His devotion to the "Senecal man," and 



THE ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 73 

the archaistic austerities of his style, are his 
alone. He was too moral for the morbidity of 
the others, and too dispassionate for their gloom. 
He was not interested in the same feelings. But 
his mind delighted in the same intricate convolu- 
tions of thought and half -absurd, serious para- 
doxes. And occasionally he strikes into those 
queer horrors that delighted Donne and Mar- 
ston, and Tourneur and Webster and Shake- 
speare. He never made a great success of drama, 
because he thought in a literary and rhetorical 
rather than dramatic way. He is good reading, 
but he would not be good seeing. There are two 
ways of displaying character in literary drama, 
through words and through action. Chapman 
has only the first ; Webster had something of the 
second too. Webster revered Chapman, but he 
was not much influenced by him. Ben Jonson 
also is at first sight apart from the spirit of this 
period, although his best work belongs to it. His 
theories of tragedy prevented him from con- 
tributing to the Marston-Tourneur-Webster 
type of play. He would have condemned the 
atmosphere which is their great virtue as un- 
classical. They probably did so — we know Web- 
ster did so — themselves. But he is very relevant, 
all the same. In the first place that attitude of 
professionalism in art and respect for the rules 



74 JOHN WEBSTER 

which he stood for all his life, was a great factor 
in raising the dignity of drama and the standard 
of the dramatists. But Jonson's chief influence 
and achievement in English drama was in found- 
ing the Comedy of Humours ; and both this kind 
of play and his examples fit in with the rest of 
the time. It is so far from sentimentalism, such 
a breaking with romantic comedy, this boisterous 
personification of the "humours" of mankind, 
with its heartiness and rough strength. It has 
the life of the time. Jonson brought comedy 
home to England and to men. The characters 
in his comedy were not complete men, but they 
were human caricatures, the right stuff for farce 
and loud laughter. Their vigour grew amazing 
under his handling. In result he gave the stage 
the best comedies of all the age. Their coarse 
splendour of life was never approached till 
twenty years or more had passed, and his influ- 
ence again was strong, in the work of some of 
his "sons." There, comedy survived the floods of 
sweetness under which tragedy utterly perished. 
But if Epicoene and The Alchemist are admi- 
rably complementary in this Pantheon to 
Sophonisha and The Duchess of Malfi and 
Timon of Athens and Macbeth^ other works of 
Jonson are something more. It is probable that 
the additions to the 1602, The Spanish Tragedy, 



THE ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 75 

are Jonson's. If so, he is responsible for some 
of the finest scenes of imaginative horror in that 
literature. These few pages (written in 1600) 
contain most of the terror and splendour of the 
next ten years. They set the tune unfalteringly. 
And Jonson did also what Marston never quite 
succeeded in doing, he wrote a good comedy 
which had more of this seventeenth century 
pungency in it than any tragedy, a comedy that 
is a real companion to the tragedies of Webster. 
The mirth of Tourneur is horrible; Languebeau 
SnufFe poises one sickly between laughter and 
loathing. Volpone is like one long laugh of 
Tourneur's, inspired by a tenfold vitality. It is 
amazing, one of the few complete works of genius 
of the Ehzabethan age. The hot cruelty and 
vigorous unhealthiness of it! Its very artistic 
perfection is frightening and exotic. 

But perhaps the main current of strength in 
the drama during these years, and certainly the 
most important for this essay, is that which ran 
through Marston and Tourneur to Webster. 
Donne was in connection with it, too, from the 
side of poetry and thought. The relation of 
Shakespeare with the whole of this period, of 
which he, then at his greatest, was, to our eyes, 
the centre, is curious. His half -connections, the 
way he was influenced and yet transmuted the 



76 JOHN WEBSTER 

influences, would require a good deal of space to 
detail. But in this, his "dark period" — whatever 
it was, neuralgia, a spiritual crisis, Mary Fitton, 
or literary fashion, that caused it — ^he was not 
unique or eccentric in the kind of his art. His 
humour was savage, he railed against sex, his 
tragedies were bloody, his heroes meditated curi- 
ously on mortality. It was all in the fashion. 
His gloom was not conspicuous in the general 
darkness. He had, in Hamlet especially, affini- 
ties with this Mars ton- Webster group. His ter- 
rific and morbid studies of madness influenced 
theirs. 

Marston is one of the most sinister, least un- 
derstood, figures in Elizabethan literature. More 
than anybody else, he determined the channels 
in which the great flood of those ten years was to 
flow. His life was curious. He started, like so 
many of them, by writing vivid, violent, crabbed 
satire. He went on to play-making, which he 
pursued for eight years with great success. He 
was much admired and very influential, but he 
always presented himself to the world with a typ- 
ical, passionate ungraciousness. At the end of 
the eight years he renounced the applause that 
he so liked disliking, and went into the Church. 
He had a queer lust for oblivion. His tombstone 
bears Oblivioni Sacrum. It was his personality 



THE ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 77 

rather than his powers that was the most stupen- 
dous thing about him. To us he seems nearly 
always just not to bring his effects oiF; but his 
contemporaries, whatever they thought, could 
not escape him. 

He started the movement of this period by 
resuscitating the old blood-and-thunder revenge 
tragedy. It was precisely what was needed, but 
he clothed it with his own peculiar temperament 
of violent and bloody satire. It was this that 
really attracted the writers of the time. He gave 
them several plays steeped in it, both comedies 
and tragedies by the ordinary classifications, 
really only of one kind. The horror and inhu- 
man violence of his laughter lit up those years 
like a vivid flash of lightning. He is responsible 
for that peculiar macabre taste, like the taste of 
copper, that is necessary to, if it is not the cause 
of, their splendour. But he was of his age in its 
strength as well as in its morbidity. 

*'My God's my arm ; my life my heaven, my grave 
To me all end," 

says Syphax. Chapman could scarcely have 
equalled the strong nobility of it. 

Marston's chief passion was for truth. He 
\ preferred it if it hurt; but he loved it anyhow. 
It comes out in the snarling speculations and 



78 JOHN WEBSTER 

harangues of those satirical malcontents he was 
so fond of. He bequeathed the type to Tourneur 
and Webster. For Marston, who was a wit and 
a scholar and a great poet, was pre-eminently a 
satirist. It was because he loved truth in that 
queer, violent way that some men do love, desir- 
ous to hurt. It fits in with his whole tempera- 
ment — vivid, snarling, itching, dirty. He loved 
dirt for truth's sake; also for its own. Filth, 
horror, and wit were his legacy; it was a splendid 
one. Some characters too, besides the Malcon- 
tent, were his offspring. He may have origi- 
nated the heroine who was wicked or non-moral, 
fascinating and not a fool. It was a type that 
was refreshingly and characteristically promi- 
nent in the great period. Cleopatra, Vittoria, 
the Insatiate Countess — ^the womanly heroine 
fades to a watery mist when they sweep on. 
Marston is more famous for what he lent than 
what he had, but what he had is superb. 

Of Tourneur (the dates of whose play, or two 
plays, are most uncertain) less need be said. 
Nowadays he is thought better than Marston. 
He is really far his inferior. He does not shock 
you in the same way by hideously violent con- 
trasts. He is more level; he is more conscious 
of his purpose; and it may be true that none of 
Marston's plays is as good as his (if he did write 



THE ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 79 

Tlie Revenger's Tragedy), But Marston is the 
greater genius. Still, Tourneur with his brilliant 
and feverish morbidity carried on the line. He 
did not influence Webster so deeply as Marston 
did. It was natural. He used for the most part 
external horrors for horror's sake. He could not 
comprehend those horrors of the mind and soul 
that Shakespeare and Webster knew and Mar- 
ston glimpsed. But Tourneur was in sight of the 
end of greatness ; the period of horrors was com- 
ing to a close. 

For Beaumont and Fletcher were beginning 
their fatal reign. At first cleanness and great- 
ness were still there; and while Beaumont lived 
the degradation could not go far, for he had a 
sense of humour and satire. His sentimentality 
had strength beneath it. He could handle metre 
like an Elizabethan. None of these things could 
be said of Fletcher. He had only a kind of wit, 
a kind of prettiness, and an inelastic sub-variety 
of the blank verse line. But for the first six years 
or so, from 1G08-1614, they, principally Beau- 
mont, were doing fairly good work. It is good 
work of a fatally new kind, but the vices of the 
new have not yet grown to their full. To these 
years The Faithful Shepherdess, The Knight of 
the Burning Pestle, Philaster, and The Maid's 



80 JOHN WEBSTER 

Tragedy belong; but drama was on a downhill 
course. 

It has sometimes been said that the most ex- 
traordinary gap in the history of our literature, 
or of any other, is the one between the beginning 
and the end of the seventeenth century. That 
little break of twenty years in the middle seems 
at first sight to have made a tremendous differ- 
ence. Dryden's inability to understand Shake- 
speare and his fellows is a commonplace; and 
one can see how inevitable it was from their 
minds. The cataclysm of the Civil War, social 
changes, and the sojourn of the generation 
abroad, are generally held responsible. (Sir 
George Etherege saw the premieres of Moliere 
in Paris.) Closer inspection shows the wrong- 
ness of this view. Anyone familiar with the life, 
literature, and drama of court circles just before 
the outbreak of the Civil War, will realise that 
the extraordinary thing is how like they are to 
the products of the Restoration period. There 
was no gap. Sir John Denham's The Sophy 
(1641) is almost indistinguishable from a Res- 
toration play. The true gap is far more remark- 
able and far earlier. It is hidden by over-lap- 
pings, but its presence is obvious about the year 
1611. Five years before that, England was 
thunderous with the most glorious tragedy and 



THE ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 81 

the strangest passion. Five years after that, 
Fletcher and the silly sweetness of tragi-comedy 
were all-powerful. The path, unmistakeably the 
same path, led on and down, through Massinger 
and Shirley. Five years before that, the intel- 
lect and the imagination had been dizzily and 
joyfully up-borne on that wit Chapman thinks 
so fine : 

"Your wit is of the true Pierian spring. 
That can make anything of anything." 

It was exhilarating, if sometimes irritating. 
The wit that succeeded it was Court humour, 
born of the fancy, touched with softness, 
feeble-winged. Heart supplanted brain, and 
senses sense. 

For all this Fletcher was to blame, or, if the 
causes were deeper, he stands a figurehead for 
our abuse. What the causes of such movements 
are, it is always difficult to say. The gradual 
change in the personnel of the theatre and its au- 
diences may have had something to do with it. 
Puritanism and democracy were becoming grad- 
ually and deplorably identified. This meant that 
the theatre was being based on only one class. 
The audiences were becoming upper-class, or 
of the upper-class party; it is even more note- 
worthy that the same thing was happening to the 



82 JOHN WEBSTER 

dramatists. Henceforward they were almost en- 
tirely drawn from court circles and the upper 
classes. Or the reason for the degeneracy may 
have lain in some deeper weariness of men's 
hearts. Anyhow, the degeneracy was there. 
Splendour became softness and tragedy tragi- 
comedy. These later dramatists were like 
Ophelia. 



'Thought and affliction, passion, hell itself. 
She turns to favour and to prettiness." 



It was in this sinking to prettiness and to ab- 
sence of seriousness that the "degeneracy" of the 
later Elizabethan drama lies, not, as some mod- 
ern critics say, in the selection of such admirable 
subjects as incest for their dramas. Compare a 
typical Fletcherian tragedy, Bonduca, with one 
of its predecessors. It is the absence of serious 
intention, the only desire to please, the lack of 
artistic morality, that make such plays, with 
their mild jokes, their co-ordinate double plots, 
and their unreality, so ultimately dreary and 
fifth-rate to a sensible reader. But such stuff 
overwhelmed England. That vulgarest of writ- 
ers, Middleton, who had been doing admirable, 
coarse, low-level comedy, rather Jonsonian and 
quite realistic, turned about 1609 to romantic 



THE ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 83 

comedy. And by 1612 even Tourneur had writ- 
ten a tragi-comedy, The Nobleman. 

But even when the triumph of prettiness was 
on its way to completion, there was one sHghtly 
old-fashioned figure still faithful to that larger 
prime. Serious tragedy seems only to have 
reached Webster, after it had left everybody 
else. In 1612 and 1613 he wrote two of the most 
amazing products of that amazing period. His 
powerful personality coloured what he wrote, 
and yet these two plays are more representative 
than any that had led to them, of the period be- 
hind them. The stream swept straight on from 
Marston and Tourneur to Webster. With him 
the sinister waves, if they lost something of their 
strange iridescence, won greater gloom and pro- 
fundity. After him they plunged into the depths 
of earth. He stands in his loneliness, first of 
that long line of "last Elizabethans." As the 
edge of a cliff seems higher than the rest for 
the sheer descent in front of it, Webster, the 
Webster of these two plays, appears even 
mistier and grander than he really is, because 
he is the last of Earth, looking out over a sea 
of saccharine. 



Chapter IV 

JOHN WEBSTER 

John Webster is one of the strangest figures 
in our literature. He was working for quite 
twenty years. We have at least four plays in 
which he collaborated, and three by him alone; 
but through all the period and in all his work 
he is quite ordinary and undistinguished, except 
for two plays which come quite close together 
in the middle. For two or three years, about 
1612, he was a great genius; for the rest he was, 
if not indistinguishable, entirely commonplace. 
Coleridge does not more extraordinarily prove 
Apollonian fickleness. Webster makes one be- 
lieve successful art depends as much on a wild 
chance, a multiple coincidence, as Browning 
found love did. If he had not had time in that 
middle period ; if it had come a little later, under 
the Fletcherian influence; if he had been born 
twenty years later; if — . . . He was just in 
time; the subject just suited him; the traditional 
atmosphere of the kind of play called out his 
greatest gifts; the right influence had preceded 

84 



JOHN WEBSTER 85 

him; he was somehow not free to write the "true 
dramatic poem" or "sententious tragedy" he 
wanted to. And so these two great tragedies 
happened to exist. That easy and comfortable 
generalisation of the Philistine "genius will out!" 
finds signal refutation in Webster. I shall give 
a short general account of his life and activities, 
and then examine his work more closely. 

We know a great deal about Webster's life. 
He was born in the latter half of the sixteenth 
century, and died some time before the end of 
the seventeenth. He was an Elizabethan 
dramatist, a friend of Dekker and Chapman and 
Heywood. He was an odd genius who created 
slowly and borrowed a great deal. He was not 
very independent. . . . 

It is, unimportantly, true that fewer "facts" 
than truths are known about him. We are luck- 
ily spared the exact dates of his uninteresting 
birth and death, and his unmeaning address and 
family. We have not even enough to serve as 
a frame-work for the elaborate structure of 
"doubtless" and "We may picture to ourselves 
young — " that stands as a biography of Shake- 
speare and others. It could, of course, be done 
by throwing our knowledge of Elizabethan con- 
ditions and our acquaintance with the character 
of the author of The Duchess of Malfi together. 



86 JOHN WEBSTER 

It would not be worth it. We loiow that Web- 
ster was a member of the Merchant Tailors' Com- 
pany, and born free of it. There is a late legend 
that he was clerk of St. Andrew's, Holborn. At 
one time it seemed possible to identify him (con- 
temporary enemies tried to) with an ex-army 
chaplain who wrote fanatical religious tracts and 
was a University reformer, in the middle of the 
seventeenth century. Superb thought! It is 
hard to degenerate nobly; and his contempo- 
raries, after reaching their summit, went down- 
hill (as writers) in various ways. Some became 
dropsical; others entered the Church; others 
went on writing; a few drank. But this, this 
would have been an end worthy of a fantastic 
poet! Alas! Mr. Dyce investigated too thor- 
oughly, and pretty certainly disproved the iden- 
tification. After his last play, Webster slips 
from us inscrutably round the corner. He may 
have lived on for years and years. He may have 
died directly. It does not matter to us. 

For the life of Webster the dramatist, how- 
ever, as opposed to Webster the private man, 
we have a few facts. He comes into our notice 
— fairly young, it is to be presumed — in 1602. 
He was then very busily one of the less important 
of a band of hack playwrights employed by 
Henslowe. He had a hand in several plays that 



JOHN WEBSTER 87 

we know of during that year: Ccesar's Fall, Two 
Shapes,^ Christmas comes hut once a year, and at 
least one part of Lady Jane, His collaborators 
were Munday, Drayton, Middleton, Hey wood, 
Chettle, Smith, and Dekker. It was the begin- 
ning, as far as we know, of a close connection 
with Dekker and a long one with Heywood. 
Webster was writing for both Henslowe's com- 
panies, C Cesar's Fall and Two Shapes for the 
Admiral's men, Christmas comes but once 
a year and Lady Jane for Worcester's men. 
Writing for Henslowe was not the best school 
for genius. No high artistic standard was ex- 
acted. It rather implies poverty, and certainly 
means scrappy and unserious work. It may 
have given Webster — it would have given some 
people — a sense of the theatre. But he emerged 
with so little facility in writing, and so little 
aptitude for a good plot (in the ordinary sense) , 
that one must conclude that his genius was not 
best fitted for theatrical expression, into which 
it was driven. There are other periods and liter- 
ary occupations it is harder to imagine him in. 
But I can figure him as a more or less realistic 
novelist of the present or the last eighty years, 
preferably from Russia. His literary skill, his 

* Perhaps the same play. See Appendix B. 



88 JOHN WEBSTER 

amazing genius for incorporating fragments of 
his experience, his "bitter flashes" and slow- 
brooding atmosphere of gloom, would have been 
more tremendous untrammelled by dramatic 
needs. His power of imaginative visualisation 
was often superfluous in a play. Like most of 
his gifts it is literary. It is just what one keenly 
misses in most novels. One can see, almost quote 
from, a rather large grey-brown novel by John 
Webster, a book full of darkly suffering human 
beings, slightly less inexplicable than Dostoiefl*- 
sky's, but as thrilling, flgures glimpsed by sud- 
den flashes that tore the gloom they were part 
of; a book such that one would remember the 
taste of the whole longer than any incident or 
character. . . . But these imaginations are fool- 
ish in an Heraclitan world, and the phrase "John 
Webster in the nineteenth century" has no mean- 
ing. 

Webster seems to have had the ordinary train- 
ing, collaborating in classical tragedy, history, 
and low comedy. None of his collaborators left 
much mark on his style. He was more sub- 
servient than impressionable. The only play 
of this lot that we have is Lady Jane, printed 
in a cut form as Sir Thomas Wyatt. Webster 
probably had a good deal to do with two Scenes, 



JOHN WEBSTER 89 

2 and 16; ^ he may be responsible for more, but, 
if so, it is indistinguishable. The whole play is 
a ramshackle, primitive (for 1602), ordinary 
affair. The parts we think Webster's are rather 
different from the rest, but no better. Metri- 
cally they are hopeless, but that may be due to 
the state of the play. There is a sort of sleepy 
imagination in — 

**Lo, we ascend into our chairs of state, 
Like funeral coffins, in some funeral pomp. 
Descending to their graves !" 

It gratifies one with a feeling of fitness, that 
Webster should have been thinking of funerals 
so early as this. Perhaps one is sentimentally 
misled, and it is really someone else's work. The 
whole thing is equally uncertain and unimpor- 
tant. 

The Induction to The Malcontent (1604), 
our earliest example of Webster's unaided writ- 
ing, is a slight piece of work, and valueless. The 
stiff involved sentences are characteristic. The 
humour is commonplace. It all shows up dully 
by the rest of the play, which is restive and in- 

^Sc. 2 is from p. 186, col. 1, "Enter Guildford," to p. 187, 
" 'cave.' Exeunt." 

So. 16 is from p. 199, end, "Enter Winchester," to p. 201, 
" 'dumb.' Exeunt." 



90 JOHN WEBSTER 

flamed with the vigorous, queer, vital, biting style 
of Marston. 

Webster seems to have gone on in the profes- 
sion of a hack author. He must have collab- 
orated in dozens of plays in these years, perhaps 
written some of his own. He next comes to 
light writing two comedies of London life with 
Dekker, Westward Ho (1604) and Northward 
Ho (1605) . This time it is good work he is con- 
cerned with, though out of his true line. They 
were written for the Children of Paul's. Web- 
ster seems to have been a free-lance at this period, 
going from company to company. But he must 
somehow have got a sort of reputation by this 
time, to be joined with Dekker in this friendly 
skirmish against Chapman, Jonson, and Mar- 
ston {Eastward Ho), who were all eminent. 
And in 1607 it seems to have been worth a pub- 
lisher's while to put his and Dekker 's names 
on the title-page of Sir Thomas Wyatt, and 
leave out Chettle, Smith, and Heywood. In 
Westward Ho and Northward Ho there are a 
few scenes I think we can be pretty certain are 
mainly Webster's; Northward Ho, II. 2 and V. 
1, very probably Westward Ho, I. 1 and III. 
3, and quite probably Northward Ho, I. 1 and 
III. 1. One seems to catch a sight of him else- 
where in the plays; but it is difficult to be cer- 



JOHN WEBSTER 91 

tain. In the scenes we attribute to him the sound 
of a deeper, graver, and duller voice than Dek- 
ker's seems to be heard. It is not altogether 
fancy. The lightness goes. The bawdy jokes 
change their complexion a little ; they come more 
from the heart and less from the pen. The peo- 
ple in the play do not live any the more or the 
less, but they become more like dead men and 
less like lively dolls. The whole thing grows less 
dramatic; the characters become self-consciously 
expository — Webster was always old-fashioned 
in this — instead of talking to each other, half- 
face to us, they turn towards the audience and 
stand side by side, addressing it. Justiniano's 
jealousy grows more serious and real when Web- 
ster takes charge of him, more unpleasantly real 
to himself, and fantastically expressed. And 
{Northward Ho, II. 2) Mistress Mayberry's 
sudden disappearance to cry stirs you with an 
unexpected little stab of pathetic reality not un- 
like the emotion the later Webster can 
arouse when he will. But the whole outlines an 
atmosphere of the plays, and the characters and 
incidents are far nearer Dekker than Webster. 
It is only possible to say either that Webster 
was merely assisting Dekker in these plays, or 
that his peculiar individuality was either un- 
grown or dormant. No doubt his romantic clas- 



92 JOHN WEBSTER 

sical ideas made him feel he was writing very 
far down to the public. But he need not have 
been ashamed, and it may very well have done 
him good. Good farce is a worthy training for 
a tragic writer; and these plays are excellent 
comic farce. The wit is not subtle, the plots 
have no psychological interest, and the ragging 
of Chapman is primitive. But the characters 
have a wealth of vitality, spirits, and comic value. 
The jokes are often quite good, especially the 
bawdy ones, and the sequence of events keeps 
your mind lively and attentive. The general at- 
mosphere in these two plays has a tang of de- 
lightful, coarse gaiety, like a country smell in 
March. They are really quite good, for the 
rough knock-about stuff they are; among the 
best in their kind, and that no bad kind. It 
would be amusing, if it were not so irritating, 
that many who are authorities in Elizabethan 
literature are violently and angrily shocked by 
these two plays, and condemn them as filth. 
Dr. Ward throws up hands of outraged refine- 
ment. Professor Schelling has an incredibly 
funny passage. "They mark the depth of gross 
and vicious realism to which the comedy of man- 
ners descended. . . . Some of the figures we 
would fain believe, in their pruriency and out- 
spoken uncleanhness of speech, represent an oc- 



JOHN WEBSTER 93 

casional aberration, if not an outrageous exag- 
geration, of the manners of the time. ... In 
our admiration of the ideal heights at times at- 
tained by the literature of the great age of Eliza- 
beth we are apt to forget that the very amplitude 
of its vibrations involves an extraordinary range, 
and that we must expect depths and morasses 
as well as wholesome and bracing moral heights. 
. . ." If literary criticism crosses Lethe, and 
we could hear the comments of the foul-mouthed 
ghosts of Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Webster 
on this too common attitude, their outspoken un- 
cleanliness would prostrate Professor Schelling 
and his friends. Anger at this impudent attempt 
to thrust the filthy and degraded standards of 
the modern middle-class drawing-room on the 
clean fineness of the Elizabethans, might be ir- 
relevant in an Essay of this sort. What is 
relevant is a protest that such thin-lipped writ- 
ers are not only ridiculous on this point, but 
also, for all their learning and patience, with- 
out sufficient authority in Elizabethan literature. 
It is impossible to trust them. Even in deciding 
a date, it may be necessary to have sympathy 
with the Elizabethans. The Elizabethans liked 
obscenity; and the primness and the wickedness 
that do not like it, have no business with them. 
There is a silence of some six years after 



94 JOHN WEBSTER 

Northward Ho, We do not know what Web- 
ster was doing. Somehow he was gaining posi- 
tion, and preparing himself. In 1611 or 1612 
he produced The White Devil, the first of the 
two plays which definitely and uniquely give 
the world Webster. Last heard of he was a 
subordinate collaborator; now he is a great, very 
individual dramatist. The step was enormous; 
but he had a long time to make it in. If Fate 
had spared us some of his interim works, we 
might not be so surprised. 

The preface to The White Devil is important 
for the light it throws both on Webster and on 
the general critical ideas of the period. "Evi- 
demment," says M. Symmes, "Webster dans 
ce passage est un des premiers a connaitre I'im- 
portance, le merite, et I'individualite du theatre 
anglais romantique, comme genre separe." ^ It 
is too strong. But he does seem to hover in a 
queer way, between intense pride in his own 
work and fine appreciation of the best among his 
contemporaries, and scorn of all these in com- 
parison to a **true dramatic poem" in the clas- 
sical style. He shows himself wholly of the 
Jonson- Chapman school of classicists, in agree- 
ment with the more cultivated critics. His gloom 

* Symmes: Les Debuts de la Critique Dramatique en Angle- 
terre, etc. 



JOHN WEBSTER 95 

fires up at the imaginary glories of these Satur- 
nian plays; he is superb in his scorn of his own 
audience. "Should a man present to such an 
auditory the most sententious tragedy that ever 
was written, observing all the critical laws, as 
height of style, and gravity of person, enrich it 
with the sententious Chorus, and, as it were, life 
in death in the passionate and weighty Nuntius; 
. . ." His arrogance was partly due, no doubt, 
to pique at the failure of the play and partly 
to the literary fashion. But it had something 
natural to him. Even in these plays he so 
scornfully wrote for the "uncap able multi- 
tude" of those times there is a sort of classicism. 
His temperament was far too romantic for it; 
he was not apt to it, like Chapman. Yet, espe- 
cially in The White Devil, the unceasing coup- 
lets at the end of speeches, both in their number 
and their nature, have a curious archaic effect. 
One line is connected with the situation, and ex- 
presses an aspect of it; the next, with the pat 
expected rhyme, goes to the general rule, and 
tm^ns the moral. It belonged to Webster's ideal 
temperament in poetry to turn readily and con- 
tinually to the greater generalisations. These 
last lines or couplets always lead out on to them. 
They went, the classicists, with a kind of glee; 



96 JOHN WEBSTER 

they liked to be in touch with permanent vague- 
nesses. 

Webster's praise of his contemporaries is, how- 
ever, very discriminating. The order he gives 
them is instructive: — Chapman; Jonson; Beau- 
mont and Fletcher; Shakespeare, Dekker, and 
Heywood. He tells us in this preface, what we 
could have guessed, that he wrote very slowly. 
It was natural, as he compiled, rather than com- 
posed, his plays; working so laboriously from 
his note-book. He may be imagined following 
doggedly behind inspiration, glooming over a 
situation till he saw the heart of it in a gesture 
or a phrase. He casts the sigh of the confirmed 
constipate at Heywood and Dekker and Shake- 
speare for their "right happy and copious in- 
dustry." His agonies in composition are amus- 
ingly described in a passage in Fitzjeffry's Notes 
from Black friars ( 1 620 ) ."^ 

The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi 
are often described as "revenge-plays," a re- 
cently-invented genus. Dr. Stoll deals at great 
length with them in this light, and Professor 
Vaughan devotes two or three pages of his short 
essay to summing up the history of the type. 
There is something in the idea, but not much; 
and it has been over-worked. To begin with, 

* Given in Dyce's 1857 edition. Introduction, p. xvi. 



JOHN WEBSTER 97 

there are far fewer examples of this type than 
these critics believe. And it is not quite clear 
what is the thread of continuity they are thinking 
of. Is it the fact that revenge is the motive in 
each play? Or is it a special type of play, the 
criterion of which is its atmosphere, and which 
generally includes vengeance as a motive? If 
the second, they must include other plays in their 
list; if the first, drop some out. The truth is 
that there is a certain type of play, the plot of 
which was based on blood-for-blood vendetta, 
and the atmosphere of which had a peculiar tinge. 
Kyd started it; it dropped for a bit, and then 
Marston revived it, rather diiFerently, with great 
foresight, at an opportune moment. It had a 
brief boom with Marston, Shakespeare, and 
Chettle. The atmosphere became indistinguish- 
able from that of a good many plays of the pe- 
riod. Tourneur took the atmosphere, and dis- 
carded the revenge-plot, in The Atheist's Trag- 
edy, So did The Second Maideris Tragedy. 
Chapman happened to take the revenge-motive, 
and went back to Seneca on his own account. 
He gives a characteristic account of the meta- 
physics of the revenge-motive in the Revenge of 
Bussy} Webster used it a little in one of two 
plays that in other ways resemble the work of 

* Chapman's Tragedies, ed. Parrott, pp. 131-2. 



98 JOHN WEBSTER 

other people who used the revenge-plot. That 
is all. To call The Duchess of Malft a revenge- 
play is simply ridiculous. If it is raked in, you 
must include Othello and a dozen more as well. 
The whole category is a false one. It would be 
much more sensible to invent and trace the 
"Trial-at-law" type, beginning with the Eumen- 
ides, going down through The Merchant of Ven- 
ice, The White Devil, Volpone, The Spanish 
Curate, and a score more, till you ended with 
Justice, 

The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi 
are so similar in atmosphere that it is sometimes 
difficult for the moment to remember in which 
of them some character or speech occurs. But 
it is convenient to consider them separately; and 
to take The White Devil first. 

The story is simple. Brachiano conceives a 
passion for Vittoria, and wins her. She suggests, 
and he plans, the death of Camillo and Isabella. 
Their love is discovered by Vittoria's mother, 
Cornelia. Isabella's brothers, Francisco and 
Monticelso, try to put an end to it, by giving it 
rope to hang itself. Before this plan can take 
effect the murders are committed. Francisco 
and Monticelso arraign Vittoria for complicity 
in the murders and for adultery. She is con- 
demned to imprisonment ; but Francisco, to bring 



JOHN WEBSTER 99 

the two nearer final ruin, plots so that she and 
Brachiano escape together to Padua and marry. 
Thither he follows them, with some friends, in 
disguise; and accomplishes their deaths. 

Webster did not handle this tale very skilfully, 
from the dramaturgic point of view. The play 
is almost a dramatised narrative. Occasionally 
the clumsiness of his hand is uncomfortably mani- 
fest. Generally it does not matter, for his virtues 
lie in a different aspect of plays from plot-mak- 
ing. The motives of the various characters are 
more obscure than they are wont to be in Eliza- 
bethan plays. On the whole this is a virtue; or 
seems to be to the modern mind. Characters in 
a play gain in realism and a mysterious solem- 
nity, if they act unexplainedly on instinct, like 
people in real life, and not on rational and pub- 
licly-stated grounds, like men in some modern 
plays. 

The play begins with a bang. From the point 
of view of the plot it is an unusual and unhelpful 
beginning. Count Lodovico ( who turns out later 
in the play to be an unsuccessful lover of Isa- 
bella, and who becomes the chief instrument in 
the downfall of Brachiano and Vittoria) has just 
been branded. He enters with a furious shout. 
"Banished!" In this scene there is an instance 
of a favourite dramatic trick of Webster's, to 



100 JOHN WEBSTER 

add liveliness. When some long speech has to 
be made, where Chapman would give it to one 
person, Webster divides it between two, con- 
tinually alternating with a few lines each. It 
makes the scene "go" in a most remarkable man- 
ner. In this case Gasparo and Antonelli do it 
to Lodovico. In The Duchess of Malfi Ferdi- 
nand and the Cardinal treat the Duchess in this 
way. 

The next scene introduces the chief characters 
and the chief emotion. This fatal love, the cause 
of the whole tragedy, enters most strikingly. 
Vittoria leaves the stage, Brachiano turns, with 
a flaming whisper, to Flamineo. He wastes no 
words. He does not foolishly tell the audience, 
"I am in love with that woman who has just gone 
off." 

Brachiano. "Flamineo " ^ 



Flamineo. "My lord?" 
Brachiano. "Quite lost, Flamineo." 

Webster thought dramatically. 

Flamineo, a typical knave of Webster's, fills 
the next few pages with a chorus of quotations 
from Montaigne. Dramatic is the juxtaposition 
of the passionate scene between Brachiano and 
Vittoria, broken by the prophetic Cornelia, the 
baiting of Brachiano by the Duke and the Cardi- 



JOHN WEBSTER 101 

nal, and the pitiful interview of Brachiano and 
his deserted wife. In the last Webster shews 
that he can turn to more untroubled tragedy 
when he wants to : 

"I pray^ sir^ burst my heart; and in my death 
Turn to your ancient pity, though not love." 

Rather swiftly, Vittoria (perhaps) and 
Brachiano, certainly, accomplish the murders; 
and Vittoria is arrested and tried. The trial 
scene is prodigiously spirited. There is no hero 
to enlist our sympathy; it is merely a contest 
between various unquenchable wickednesses. 
The rattle of rapid question and answer, sharp 
with bitterness, is like musketiy. Vittoria is 
wicked; but her enemies are wicked and mean. 
So one sides with her, and even admires. Her 
spirit of ceaseless resistance and fury, like the 
wriggling of a trapped cat, is astonishing. 

"For your names 
Of whore and murdress, they proceed from you. 
As if a man should spit against the wind ; 
The filth returns in's face." 

Flamineo's subsequent affectation of madness 
and melancholy is made too much of; for the 
purpose of amusing, perhaps. At this point in 
the play, the two "villains" part company. Fran- 



102 JOHN WEBSTER 

cisco pursues his way alone. The scene between 
Brachiano, in his groundless jealousy, and Vit- 
toria, is tremendous with every kind of beauty 
and horror; beginning from the extraordinarily 
un- Websterian : 

"How long have I beheld the devil in crystal ! 
Thou hast led me, like an heathen sacrifice. 
With music and with fatal yokes of flowers, 
To my eternal ruin. Woman to man 
Is either a god or a wolf." 

The taming of the wild cat, Vittoria, is shown 
with wonderfully precise and profound psychol- 
ogy; and all made horrible by the ceaseless and 
eager prompting of Flamineo. 

"Fie, fie, my lord! 
Women are caught as you take tortoises;. 
She must be turned on her back." 

The scene of the election of the Pope is an ir- 
relevant ornament. It is noteworthy that to 
some extent Webster improved in dramatic craft 
with time. The Duchess of Malfi has fewer such 
scenes than The White Devil, 

The last part of the play, after it removes to 
Padua, is one long study of the horror of death. 
It takes it from every point of view. There is 
the pathetic incomprehension of Cornelia over 
young Marcello. "Alas! he is not dead; he is 



JOHN WEBSTER 103 

in a trance. Why, here's nobody shall get any- 
thing by his death. Let me call him again for 
God's sake." 

There is the difficulty and struggle of the death 
of so intensely live a man as Brachiano : 

"Oh, thou strong heart! 
There's such a covenant 'tween the world and it. 
They're loath to break." 

There is the grotesque parody of death, in 
Flamineo's 

"Oh I smell soot. 
Most stinking soot ! The chimney is afire. . . . 
There's a plumber laying pipes in my guts, it scalds." 

There is the superbness of Vittoria's courage; 

"Yes I shall welcome death 
As princes do some great ambassadors; 
I'll meet thy weapon half-way-" 

There are the "black storm" and the "mist" 
which drive around Vittoria and Flamineo in the 
last moments of all. 

The Duchess of Malfi is on the whole a better 
play than The White Devil. It does not have 
more of Webster's supreme dramatic moments, 
but the language is more rich and variously mov- 
ing — in a dramatic, not merely a literary way. 



104 JOHN WEBSTER 

It is, even more than The White Devil, in the 
first half a mere simple narrative of events, lead- 
ing up to a long-continued and various hell in 
the second part. It is often discussed if the plots 
of The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi 
are weak. Webster's method does not really 
take cognisance of a plot in the ordinary sense 
of the word. He is too atmospheric. It is like 
enquiring if there is bad drawing in a nocturne 
of Whistler's. 

The Duchess of Malfi is a young widow, for- 
bidden by her brothers, Ferdinand and the Car- 
dinal, to marry again. They put a creature of 
theirs, Bosola, into her service as a spy. The 
Duchess loves and secretly marries her steward, 
Antonio, and has three children. Bosola ulti- 
mately discovers and reports this. Antonio and 
the Duchess have to fly. The Duchess is cap- 
tured, imprisoned, and mentally tortured and 
put to death. Ferdinand goes mad. In the last 
Act he, the Cardinal, Antonio, and Bosola are 
all killed with various confusions and in various 
horror. 

The play begins more slowly than The White 
Devil, Bosola appears near the beginning, and 
plays throughout a part like that of Flamineo. 
The great scene in the first Act is the scene 
of the Duchess's proposal to Antonio. It is full 



JOHN WEBSTER 105 

of that perfect, tender beauty which the stormy 
Webster could evoke when he liked; from the 
Duchess's preliminary farewell to her maid, 

"Good dear soul, 

• » » • • • 

Wish me good speed; 
For I am going into a wilderness 
Where I shall find nor path nor friendly clue 
To be my guide." 

to the maid's concluding comment: 

"Whether the spirit of greatness or of women 
Reign most in her^ I know not; but it shows 
A fearful madness : I owe her much of pity." 

There is rather hideous and very typical trag- 
edy in the scene of Bosola's device to discover 
the Duchess's secret. The meeting of Bosola and 
Antonio, at midnight, after the birth of the child, 
is full of dramatic power and of breathless sus- 
pense that worthily recalls Macbeth, 

Ant. "Bosola! . . . 

heard you not 
A noise even now.f* 
Bos. From whence? 
Ant. From the Duchess's lodging. 
Bos. Not I: did you? 
Ant. I did, or else I dreamed. 
Bos. Let's walk towards it. 
Ant. No: it may be 'twas 

But the rising of the wind. 
Bos. Very likely. . . ." 



106 JOHN WEBSTER 

When the news is brought to the brothers that 
the Duchess has had a child, their anger is hide- 
ous and, as with passionate people, too imagina- 
tive. 

After this, and before the events which lead 
to the catastrophe, that is, between the second 
and third Acts, there is a long and somewhat 
clumsy interval. This was rather in the dra- 
matic fashion of the time. Ferdinand's discovery 
of the Duchess's guilt breaks finely across a 
lovely scene of domestic merriment. The plot 
unravels swiftly. The final parting of the Duch- 
ess and Antonio is full of a remarkable quiet 
beauty of phrase and poetry. It is a mere acci- 
dent that we have discovered that it is entirely 
composed of fragments of, and adaptations from, 
Sidney, Donne, Ben Jonson, and others. The 
scenes of the various tortures of the Duchess 
form an immense and not always successful sym- 
phony of gloom, horror, madness, and death. It 
is only redeemed by the fact that the Duchess can 
never be quite broken: 

"I am Duchess of Malfi still." 

Only once, just before death, does she let an 
hysterical cry escape her: 

"any way, for Heaven's sake. 
So I were out of your whispering." 



JOHN WEBSTER 107 

The superhuman death of the Duchess is finely 
anti-chmaxed by the too human death of Cariola, 
who fights, kicks, prays, and lies. 

After the death of the Duchess, there is a 
slight lull before the rest of the tragedy rises 
again to its climax. It contains a queer scene of 
macabre comedy where Ferdinand beats his fan- 
tastic doctor, and a curious, rather Gothic, ex- 
traneous scene of quietness, where Antonio talks 
to the echo. The end is a maze of death and 
madness. Webster's supreme gift is the blind- 
ing revelation of some intense state of mind at 
a crisis, by some God-given phrase. All the last 
half of The Lkuchess of Malfi is full of them. 
The mad Ferdinand, stealing across the stage in 
the dark, whispering to himself, with the dev- 
astating impersonality of the madman, "Stran- 
gling is a very quiet death," is a figure one may 
not forget. And so in the next scene, the too 
sane Cardinal; — 

"How tedious is a guilty conscience! 
When I look into the fish-ponds in my garden 
Methinks I see a thing armed with a rake 
That seems to strike at me." 

It is one of those pieces of imagination one can- 
not explain, only admire. 

But it is, of course, in or near the moment 



108 JOHN WEBSTER 

of death that Webster is most triumphant. He 
adopts the romantic convention, that men are, 
in the second of death, most essentially and sig- 
nificantly themselves. In the earlier play the 
whole angry, sickening fear of death that a man 
feels who has feared nothing else, lies in those 
terrific words of Brachiano's when it comes home 
to him that he is fatally poisoned: — 

"On pain of death, let no man name death to me : 
It is a word infinitely terrible." 

Webster knows all the ways of approaching 
death. Flamineo, with the strange carelessness 
of the dying man, grows suddenly noble. "What 
dost think on?" his murderer asks him. 

Flamineo. "Nothing; of nothing; leave thy idle 
questions. 
I am i' the way to study a long silence: 
To prate were idle. I remember nothing. 
There's nothing of so infinite vexation 
As man's own thoughts." 

And Webster, more than any man in the world, 
has caught the soul just in the second of its 
decomposition in death, when knowledge seems 
transcended, and the darkness closes in, and 
boundaries fall away. 

"My soul," cries Vittoria, "like to a ship in a black storm, 
Is driven, I know not whither." 



JOHN WEBSTER 109 

And Flamineo — 

**While we look up to Heaven we confound 
Knowledge with knowledge, O, I am in a mist." 

So in this play Ferdinand "seems to come to 
himself," as Bosola says, "now he's so near the 
bottom." He is still half-mad; but something 
of the old overweening claim on the universe 
fires up in the demented brain : 

"Give me some wet hay: I am broken-minded. 
I do account this world but a dog-kennel: 
I will vault credit and affect high pleasures 
Beyond death." 

For some six years again, after The Duchess 
of Malfi, we know nothing of Webster's activi- 
ties. When he comes once more into sight in 
The Devil's Law-Case (1620) he has shared the 
fate of the whole drama. It is an attempt to 
write in the Massinger-Fletcher genus of tragi- 
comedy. The plot is of so complicated a nature 
that it would take almost the space of the whole 
play to set it out fully. Indeed there is scarcely 
a plot at all, but a succession of plots, interwoven, 
and each used, in the debased way of that period, 
almost only to produce some ingeniously start- 
ling scene, some theatrical paradox. It was, 
probably, Fletcher who was responsible for this 



no JOHN WEBSTER 

love of a succession of dramatic shocks. It suited 
a part of Webster's taste only too well. 

The main incident of the play is a malicious 
suit brought by a mother, Leonora, against her 
son, Romelio, trying to dispossess him on the 
(false) ground of bastardy. Tacked on to that 
are various minor affairs, a duel between friends 
in which both are supposed to have been killed 
and both marvellously survive, a virgin pretend- 
ing to be with child, a sick man miraculously 
cured by an assassin's unintentionally medicinal 
knife, and so on. The most central incident may 
have been suggested to Webster by an old play. 
Lust's Dominion; the cure he got from a transla- 
tion of some French yarns. But the question 
of his originality is unimportant. All his inci- 
dents aim at that cheap fantasticality which 
marked this Jacobean drama. And his topics 
are its well-rubbed coins, romantic friendship, 
sudden "passion," virginity, duelling, seduction. 
A most dully debonair world. However, he 
could not handle them with the same touch. 
Webster stepped the same measures as his con- 
temporaries, willingly enough — conceitedly even, 
as his dedication and preface show; but with 
earlier legs. His characters alternate between 
being the sometimes charming lay-figures of the 
time, and wakening to the boisterous liveliness 



JOHN WEBSTER 111 

of fifteen years before. Several scenes are very 
noticeably Jonsonian interludes of farce, sand- 
wiched between comedy. The vigorous flow of 
Act II, Scene 1 (pages 114-116) is wholly remi- 
niscent of the comedy of humours. This is part- 
ly due to the purely satiric character of some of 
the passages. The dramatists of the beginning 
of the century loved to play Juvenal. They 
would still be railing. Webster was especially 
prone to it. Repeatedly, in The DeviVs Law- 
Case^ this habit of abuse, directed against one 
person or the world, recalls Webster's two great 
plays. There are a score of passages where you 
immediately cry "Webster!" the note is so indi- 
vidual. And they are mostly of this satiric kind. 
Who else could have written (I. 1) : 

"With what a compeird face a woman sits 
While she is drawing ! I have noted divers, 
Either to feign smiles, or suck in the lips, 
To have a little mouth; ruffle the cheeks 
To have the dimple seen; and so disorder 
The face with affectation, at next sitting 
It has not been the same: . . ." 

The "I have noted" of the professional satirist 
is unmistakeable. 

But, indeed, the essence of Webster pervades 
this "tragi-comedy." And the result is that it 
is as far different from other tragi-comedies in 



112 JOHN WEBSTER 

its spirit, as Measure for Measure is from the 
comedies among which it is numbered. His vo- 
cabulary and pecuhar use of words peep out 
on every page; "passionately," "infinitely," 
"screech-owl," "a lordship," "caroche," "mathe- 
matical," "dung-hill," "foul" a hundred times; 
and all in sentences that have the very run of his 
accents. There are scores of short passages. 
Webster's characters have the trick of comment- 
ing on themselves when they are jesting. "You 
see, my lord, we are merry," cries Romelio (p. 
Ill), and so Sanitonella (p. 114), "I am merry." 
The Duchess inevitably comes to one's mind, in 
that happy moment before her world crumbled 
about her, "I prithee, when were we so merry?" 
It is a trick that makes the transience or the un- 
reality of their merriment stand out against the 
normal and real gloom. Continually in this play, 
as in the others, Webster is referring to women 
painting their faces. The subject had a queer ^| 
fascination for him. Those other, more obvious, 
thoughts of his reappear, too; his broodings on 
death and graves. There is the same savagery 
in his mirth : 

"But do you not think" 

says Jolenta, suddenly, when she has acceded to 
Romelio's horrible plannings. 



JOHN WEBSTER 113 

"1 shall have a horrible strong breath now?'* 
RoMELio. "Why?" 

JoLENTA. "O, with keeping your counsel, 'tis so terrible 
foul." 

"Bitter flashes" Romelio rightly calls such out- 
bursts. But he himself achieves wit most suc- 
cessfully in the same mood and manner. When 
the Capuchin worries him, before his duel, about 
religion, he, "very melancholy," retorts with a 
question about swords — 

"These things, you know," the Capuchin re- 
plies, "are out of my practice." 

"But these are things, you know, 
I must practise with to-morrow." 

Romelio sardonically returns. It is very clear 
throughout that the bitterer Webster's flashes 
are, the brighter. And in a similar way he livens 
up when he approaches any emotion such as 
Jolenta describes, in herself, as "fantastical sor- 
row." It is the fantastical in emotion or char- 
acter that inspires him, while the fantastical in 
situation leaves him comparatively cold. He es- 
says the latter, dutifully — the usual intellectual 
paradoxes and morbid conventions of impossible 
psychology which this kind of drama demanded. 
In that typically-set Websterian scene (Act III. 
Scene 3 — A table set forth with two tapers, a 



114 JOHN WEBSTER 

death's-head, a book.) between Romelio and Jo- 
lenta, love, hate, passion, anger, and grief play 
General Post with all the unnatural speed the 
Jacobeans loved. He has even invested the starts 
and turns of the trial-scene with a good deal of 
interest and much dramatic power. But the an- 
guish that apes mirth and the mirth that toys 
with pain wake his genius. He even laughs at 
himself. You feel an almost personal resentment 
at being sold, towards the end of the play. Ro- 
melio's sullen but impressive stoicism is broken 
by Leonora's entrance with coffins and winding- 
sheets and that incomparable dirge. 

". . . Courts adieu, and all delights. 
All bewitcliing appetites ! 
Sweetest breath and clearest eye, 
Like perfumes, go out and die; 
And consequently this is done 
As shadows wait upon the sun. 
Vain the ambition of kings, 
Who seek by trophies and dead things 
To leave a living name behind, 
And weave but nets to catch. the wind/* 

Romelio, like any reader, is caught by the ut- 
ter beauty of this. He melts in repentance, per- 
suades his mother, and then the priest, to enter 
the closet, and then — locks them in with entire 
callousness and a dirty jest, and goes off to his 
duel. It is, literally, shocking. But Romelio is 



JOHN WEBSTER 115 

one of the two or three characters into whom 
Webster has breathed a spasmodic hf e and force. 
The ordinary dolls of the drama, like Contarino 
and Ercole, remain dolls in his hands. But the 
lust and grief of Leonora have some semblance 
of motion, the suffering of Jolenta has an hys- 
terical truth, and the figure of Romelio lives 
sometimes with the vitality of an intruder from 
another world. He comes out of the earlier 
drama. He is largely the sort of monster Ben 
Jonson or Marlowe, or Kyd or Tourneur, or the 
earlier Webster likes to picture, malign, immoral, 
grotesque, and hideously alive. Winifred also 
is older than 1620. She has an unpleasant vi- 
vacity, a rank itch of vulgarity, as well as the 
office of commentator, which reminds one of 
characters in Webster's two great plays. She 
is a Bosola in skirts. A sure sign, she grows 
more excited when love-making is to hand. It 
is typical of Webster that he should smirch with 
his especial rankness, not only the baser char- 
acters of this play, but the love-making between 
his hero and heroine, as he does through Wini- 
fred's mouth in the second scene of the play. 
Like any Flamineo, she interprets between us 
and the puppets' dallying, a little disgustingly: 

"O sweet-breath'd monkeys, how they grow together !'*.., 



U' 



116 JOHN WEBSTER 

A few incidents stand out, marked by the 
darker range of colours of the earlier drama. 
Contarino's groan that announces that he is not 
dead (III. 2) : 

Con. "O r 

First Surgeon. "Did he not groan?'* 

Second Surgeon. "Is the wind in that door still?'* 

has something of the terror and abrupt ghostli- 
ness of the midnight scene in The Duchess of 
Malfi (II. 3), or Macbeth, or Jonson's additions 
to The Spanish Tragedy. And Leonora's mad 
flinging herself on the ground in III. 3, and ly- 
ing there, is an old trick that the early Eliza- 
bethan audiences almost demanded as an essen- 
tial of Tragedy. It goes back through Ferdi- 
nand, Bussy, and Marston's heroes, to old Hier- 
onimo herself. 

Webster's note-book is perhaps a little less 
apparent in this play than in the two previous. 
But there are a good many passages we can iden- 
tify, and a lot more we can suspect. He had 
fewer "meditations" of the old railing order to 
compile from his pages of aphorisms and modern 
instances. But we find repetitions from A Mon- 
umental Column, The White Devil, and espe- 
cially The Duchess of Malfi; and Ben Jonson 
and Sidney have found their way through the 



JOHN WEBSTER ll7 

note-book into these pages. He still employs 
soliloquy and the concluding couplet to an extent 
and in a way that seem queer in a play of this 
period. But he seems to have become a little 
more sensible to violent incongruity. He never 
offends so harshly as he had used. Occasionally 
still, the stage-machinery creaks loudly enough 
to disturb the theatrical illusion rather unpleas- 
antly. Sanitonella is a little abrupt and blunt 
in exacting information from Crispiano for our 
benefit: — "But, pray, sir, resolve me, what should 
be the reason that you . . ."etc. (II. 1). And 
Romelio's asides are occasionally rather too obvi- 
ous. In III. 3, when his various proposals to 
Jolenta have been ineffectual, he is non-plussed ; 
but only for a second: 

RoMELio (aside) "This will not do. 

The devil has on the sudden furnished me 
With a rare charm, yet a most unnatural 
Falsehood: no matter, so 'twill take. — " 

But at the end, when everybody reveals who he 
is, and begins explaining everything that has hap- 
pened, the tedium of these disentanglings is cut, 
and the apparently inevitable boredom dodged, 
by a device that is so audacious in its simplicity 
as to demand admiration. Leonora, who has ap- 
parently made good use of her imprisonment 



118 JOHN WEBSTER 

in the closet to jot down a precis of all the plots 
in the play, interrupts the growing flood of ex- 
planations with 

"Cease here all further scrutiny. This paper 
Shall give unto the court each circumstance 
Of all these passages!" 

One is too relieved to object. 

Metrically this play is very similar to its two 
forerunners; though here, as in the handling, 
Webster seems a little quieter. He is unaffected 
by the Fletcher influence in metre. The run of 
his lines is still elusive and without any marked 
melody, except in one or two passages. The be- 
ginning lines with w ^ — the continual shift- 
ing and sliding of accent, and the jerky effect 
of conversation, continue. It was always a blank 
verse for talking rather than reading. One trick 
Webster seems to have developed further, the fill- 
ing out of feet with almost inadequate syllables. 
Twice in the first five pages "marriage" is a 
trisyllable. *TEmotion" fills two feet; and so on. 
This habit, common between 1580 and 1595, was 
revived by some writers after 1615. It fits in 
very queerly with that opposite tendency to the 
use of trisyllabic feet that Webster greatly in- 
dulged in. Sometimes the combination is rather 
piquant. But "marriage" is, perhaps, a symp- 



JOHN WEBSTER 119 

torn of an increased steadiness and mastery of 
rhythm. There are two or three passages where 
his blank verse is abler and better, in considerable 
periods, not in short fragments and exclamations, 
than it had been before. And this is accompa- 
nied by a greater evenness. Leonora's great 
speech (III. 3) begins with something of the 
old ripple: but it dies away: 

". . . Is he gone then? 
There is no plague i' the world can be compared 
To impossible desire; for they are plagu'd 
In the desire itself. . . . 

O, I shall run mad ! 
For as we love our youngest children best, 
So the last fruit of our affection, 
Where-ever we bestow it, is most strong. 
Most violent, most unresistable. 
Since 'tis indeed our latest harvest-home. 
Last merriment 'fore winter. . . ." 

The beauty and pathos of these lines, the com- 
plete and masterful welding of music and mean- 
ing, show what fineness is in The Devil's Law- 
Case, One could quote many other things as 
noble, or as admirable, from Romelio's glorious 

*'I cannot set myself so many fathom 
Beneath the height of my true heart, as fear," 

or the sagacious and horrid rightness of his 



120 JOHN WEBSTER 

"doves never couple without 
A kind of murmur," 

to Jolenta's cry, 

*'0, if there be another world i' the moon 
As some fantastics dream. . . ." 

Yet the play is not a good play. These good 
bits illuminate, for the most part, nothing but 
themselves, and have only a literary value, A 
good play must leave an increasing impression 
of beauty or terror or mirth upon the mind, 
heaping its effect continually with a thousand 
trifles. This does not so. It is a play without 
wholeness. Its merits are occasional and acci- 
dental. If you read closely, there is the ex- 
traordinary personality of Webster plain enough 
over and in it all. But he was working in an 
uncongenial medium. It is a supreme instance 
of the importance of the right form to the artist. 
The Fletcher-Massinger "tragi-comedy" was 
the product of an age and temper as unsuitable 
to Webster as the tragedy of blood and dirt had 
been suitable. The Devil's Law-Case is not even 
a fine failure, as, for instance, Tiinon of Athens 
is. In the first place a tragi-comedy is not a 
thing to make a fine failure of. And in the sec- 
ond place Webster's nature and methods de- 
manded success in a right form, or nothing. He 



JOHN WEBSTER 121 

had to suffuse the play with himself. He was 
not great enough and romantic enough to con- 
fer immortality upon fragments. His bitter 
flashes required the background of thunderous 
darkness to show them up ; against this grey day- 
light they are ineffectual. 

Beyond the uninteresting and unimportant A 
Monumental Column (1613), which only shows 
how naturally Webster turned to the imitation 
of Donne when he turned to poetry, the uncer- 
tain and featureless Monuments of Honour, and 
a few rather perfunctory verses of commenda- 
tion, we have nothing more of Webster's except 
A Cure for a Cuckold, This must have been 
written shortly after The Devil's Law-Case, It 
is almost entirely unimportant for throwing light 
on the real Webster. All we know is that he 
had something to do with the play; how much 
or little it is impossible to tell from reading it. 
He may be responsible for the whole of the main 
plot. That it is not so obscure and unmotivated 
as has sometimes been supposed, I have shown 
in an Appendix ; but it is not good. Parts have a 
slight, unreal, charm for those who are interested 
in antiquities. The way in which in IV. 3 (p. 
310) Lessingham suddenly sulks, and goes off 



122 JOHN WEBSTER 

to make mischief, in order to spin the play out 
for another act and a bit, is childish. 

It is a pity we cannot barter with oblivion and 
give A Cure for a Cuckold for Ford and Web- 
ster's lost murder play. This was one of the 
last, and it must have been one of the best, of 
the Elizabethan domestic tragedies. What a 
superb combination. Ford and Webster! And 
on such a subject! It may have been again, after 
all those years, the last cry of the true voice of 
Elizabethan drama. Once, in 1624, there was, 
perhaps, a tragedy of blood, not of sawdust. 
It is beyond our reach. 



Chapter V 

SOME CHARACTERISTICS OF 
WEBSTER 

It happens, with some writers, that when you 
come to examine their less-known works, your 
idea of them suffers considerable change, and 
you realise that the common conception of them 
is incomplete, distorted, or even entirely wrong. 
This is not the case with Webster. He is known 
to everyone by two plays — The Duchess of Malfi 
and The White Devil, The most diligent study 
of the rest of his authentic works will scarcely 
add anything of value to that knowledge of him. 
He is a remarkable dramatist, with an unusually 
individual style and emotional view of the world. 
What "Webster," the literary personality, means 
to us, its precise character, and its importance, 
can be discovered and explained from these two 
plays. So I shall chiefly consider and quote them, 
with an occasional sidelight from The DeviVs 
Law-Case, 

It is one task of a critic, no doubt, to communi- 
cate exactly his emotions at what he is criticising, 

123 



124 JOHN WEBSTER 

to express and define the precise savour. But it 
is not a thing one can go on at for long. Hav- 
ing tried to hint once or twice what "Webster" 
precisely is, I had better analyse various aspects 
of him, and not tiresomely, like some political 
speaker, seek about for a great many ways of 
saying the same thing. And after all, Webster 
carries his own sense and savour. A showman, 
"motley on back and pointing-pole in hand," can 
but draw attention, and deliver a prologue. If 
I can explain briefly to anyone the sort of plays 
Webster was writing, the sort of characters that 
he took delight in, the kind of verse he used, the 
kind of literary effect he probably aimed at — 
as I see all these things — I can then only take 
him up to a speech of the Duchess and leave him 
there. One cannot explain 

"What would it pleasure me to have my throat cut 
With diamonds? or to be smothered 
With cassia ? or to be shot to death with pearls ? 
I know death hath ten thousand several doors 
For men to take their exits; and 'tis found 
They go on such strange geometrical hinges 
You may open them both ways : . . ." 

To paraphrase it, or to hang it with epithets, 
would be silly, almost indecent. One can only 
quote. And though quotation is pleasant, it is 
a cheap way of filling space ; and I have written 



CHARACTERISTICS 125 

this essay on the assumption that its readers 
will be able to have at least The Duchess of Malfi 
and The White Devil before them. 

So I shall only attempt, in this chapter, to men- 
tion some of Webster's most interesting charac- 
teristics, and to analyse one or two of them. 

His general position, as the rearguard of the 
great period in Elizabethan drama and litera- 
ture, I have already outlined. He took a certain 
kind of play, a play with a certain atmosphere, 
which appealed to him, and made two works of 
individual genius. Beyond this type of play 
and the tradition of it, there are no very im- 
portant "influences" on him. Shakespeare's 
studies of madness may have affected him. The 
Duchess, 

"I'll tell thee a miracle; 
I am not mad yet, to my cause of sorrow; 
The heaven o'er my head seems made of molten brass^ 
The earth of flaming sulphur, yet I am not mad," 

has a note of Lear in it, but also, and perhaps 
more definitely, of A ntonio and Mellida, From 
Ben Jonson and Chapman he borrowed. And 
something of their attitude to drama became his. 
But he does not imitate them in any important 
individual quality. He pillaged Donne, too, as 
much of him as was accessible to a middle-class 
dramatist, and occasionally seems to emulate the 



126 JOHN WEBSTER 

extraordinary processes of that mind. The char- 
acters in Webster's plays^ Hke the treatment of 
the story, in as far as they are not his own, are 
the usual characters of the drama of eight years 
before. Once only does he noticeably seem to 
take a figure from the popular gallery of the 
years in which he was writing. The little prince 
Giovanni, like Shakespeare's Mamillius, is 
adopted from the Beaumont and Fletcher chil- 
dren. He has the same precocity in wit (it seems 
a little distressing to modern taste), and more 
of their sentimentality than Hermione's son. 
But, against that background, he is, on the whole, 
a touching and lovely figure. 

The one influence upon Webster that is al- 
ways noticeable is that of satire. His nature 
tended to the outlook of satire; and his plays 
give evidence that he read Elizabethan, and in 
some form Latin satire with avidity. Hamlet, 
the Malcontent, and all the heroes of that type 
of play, "railed" continually. But with Webster 
every character and nearly every speech has 
something of the satirical outlook. They de- 
scribe each other satirically. They are for ever 
girding at the conventional objects of satire, cer- 
tain social follies and crimes. There are several 
little irrelevant scenes of satire, like the malevo- 
lent discussion of Count Malatesti [D.M,, III. 



CHARACTERISTICS 127 

3) . It is incessant. The topics are the ordinary 
ones, the painting of women, the ingratitude of 
princes, the swaggering of blusterers, the cow- 
ardice of pseudo-soldiers. It gives part of the 
peculiar atmosphere of these plays. 

This rests on a side of Webster's nature, which, 
in combination with his extraordinary literary 
gifts, produces another queer characteristic of his 
— his fondness for, and skill in comment. He 
is rather more like a literary man trying to write 
for the theatre than any of his contemporaries. 
Theatrically, though he is competent and some- 
times powerful, he exhibits no vastly unusual 
ability. It is his comments that bite deep. Such 
gems as Flamineo's description of Camillo: 

"When he wears white satin one would take him 
by his black muzzle to be no other creature than a 
maggot;" 

or of the Spanish ambassador: 

"He carries his face in's ruff, as I have seen a 
serving man carry glasses in a cipress hat-band, 
monstrous steady, for fear of breaking: he looks 
like the claw of a black-bird, first salted, and then 
broiled in a candle;" 

or Lodovico's of the black woman Zanche in love : 

"Mark her, I prithee ; she simpers like the suds 
A collier hath been washed in;" 



128 JOHN WEBSTER 

have frequently been quoted. They have a 
purely literary merit. In other places he 
achieves a dramatic effect, which would be a lit- 
tle less in a theatre than in the book, by com- 
ment. When Bosola brings the terrible discov- 
ery of the secret to Ferdinand and the Cardinal, 
he communicates it to them, unheard by us, up- 
stage. We only know, in reading, how they take 
it, by the comments of Pescara, Silvio, and Delio, 
who are watching, down-stage — 

Pesc. "Mark Prince Ferdinand: 

A very salamander lives in's eye. 
To mock the eager violence of fire." 

SiL. "That cardinal hath made more bad faces with his 
oppression than ever Michael Angelo made good 
ones: he lifts up's nose like a foul porpoise before 
a storm." 

Pes. "The Lord Ferdinand laughs." 

Del. "Like a deadly cannon 

That lightens ere it smokes . . ." 

it goes straight to the nerves. "The Lord Ferdi- 
nand laughs." It is unforgettable. 

Webster had always, in his supreme moments, 
'that trick of playing directly on the nerves. It 
is the secret of Bosola's tortures of the Duchess, 
and of much of Flamineo. Though the popular 
conception of him is rather one of immense gloom 
and perpetual preoccupation with death, his 
power lies almost more in the intense, sometimes 



CHARACTERISTICS 129 

horrible, vigour of some of his scenes, and his 
uncanny probing to the depths of the heart. In 
his characters you see the instincts at work jerk- 
ing and actuating them, and emotions pouring 
out irregularly, unconsciously, in floods or spurts 
and jets, driven outward from within, as you 
sometime*- do in real people. 

The method of progression which Webster 
used in his writing, from speech to speech or 
idea to idea, is curiously individual. The ideas 
do not develop into each other as in Shakespeare, 
nor are they tied together in neatly planned 
curves as in Beaumont and Fletcher. He seems 
to have, and we know he did, put them into the 
stream of thought from outside; plumping them 
down side by side. Yet the very cumbrousness 
of this adds, in a way, to the passion and force 
of his scenes, as a swift stream seems swifter and 
wilder when its course is broken by rocks and 
boulders. The craft of Shakespeare's genius 
moves with a speedy beauty like a yacht running 
close into the wind ; Websters is a barge quanted 
slowly but incessantly along some canal, cum- 
brous but rather impressive. 

This quality of the progression of Webster's 
thought, and, in part, of his language, contrasts 
curiously with his metre. The Elizabethan use of 
blank verse was always liable to be rather fine; 



130 JOHN WEBSTER 

but there was only a short period, and it was 
only in a few writers, that it got really free — 
until its final dissolution in the thirties. Web- 
ster was one of these writers, probably the freest. 
Only Shakespeare can approach him in the lib- 
erties he took with blank verse ; but Shakespeare's 
liberties conformed to higher laws. Webster 
probably had a worse ear for metre, at least in 
blank verse, than any of his contemporaries. His 
verse is perpetually of a vague, troubled kind. 
Each line tends to have about ten syllables and 
about five feet. It looks in the distance like a 
blank verse line. Sometimes this line is extraor- 
dinarily successful ; though it is never quite scan- 
nable. Brachiano's 

**It is a word infinitely terrible," 

is tremendously moving. But sometimes Web- 
ster's metrical extravagance does not justify it- 
self, and rather harasses. The trick of beginning 
a line with two unaccented syllables, if repeated 
too often in the same passage, does more to break 
the back of the metre than almost any other pos- 
sible peculiarity. 

On the whole it is probable that Webster did 
all this on purpose, seeing that a larger licence 
of metre suits blank verse in drama than is per- 
missible in literature. When he turned poet, 



CHARACTERISTICS 131 

in A Monumental Column, he is equally unmet- 
rical; but that can probably be attributed to 
the very strong influence of Donne. Certainly 
the lyrics in his plays would seem to show that 
as a lyric poet he could have been among the 
greatest, a master of every subtlety, at least of 
that lyric metre which he did use. It is the one 
which the Elizabethans, almost, invented, and 
upon which they performed an inconceivable va- 
riety of music. Milton, who learnt so much from 
them in this respect, made this metre the chief 
part of his heritage. But even he could not in- 
clude all that various music. It is the metre of 
U Allegro, II Penseroso, and the end of Comus, 
No man ever got a stranger and more perfect 
melody from it than Webster in his dirges. 

Webster's handling of a play, and his style of 
writing, have something rather slow and old- 
fashioned about them. He was not like Shake- 
speare or Beaumont and Fletcher, up-to-date and 
"slick." He worried his plays out with a grunt- 
ing pertinacity. There are several uncouth char- 
acteristics of his that have an effect which halts 
between archaism and a kind of childish awk- 
wardness, like "primitive" art of various nations 
and periods. Sometimes he achieves the same 
result it can have, of a simplicity and directness 
refreshingly different from later artifice and ac- 



132 JOHN WEBSTER 

complishment. Sometimes he only seems, to the 
most kindly critic, to fail hopelessly for lack of 
skill. One of these characteristics is the use of 
couplets, usually to end the scene, and commonly 
of a generalising nature. This is, of course, old- 
fashioned. The frequency of such couplets is 
an often-noticed feature of the early Elizabethan 
drama: and the plays of such a writer as Shake- 
speare are dated by the help of the percentage 
of rhyming to unrhyming lines. Even as late 
as Webster, other authors sometimes ended the 
play, or a scene, with a couplet. But they did 
it with grace; using it almost as a musical de- 
vice, to bring the continued melody of their verse 
to a close. And in the earlier plays, where one 
or more rhyming couplets end most scenes and 
many speeches, and even, especially in the more 
lyrical parts, come into the middle of passages, 
the rest of the versification is of a simple, rhyth- 
mical end-stopped kind; and so the couplets 
seem scarcely different from the rest, a deeper 
shade of the same colour. Webster's couplets 
are electric green or crimson, a violent contrast 
with the rough, jerky, sketchy blank verse he 
generally uses. Some of them are so incongru- 
ous as to be ridiculous. At the end of a stormy 
passage with the Cardinal, Ferdinand says : 



CHARACTERISTICS 133 

"In, in; I'll go sleep. 
Till I know who leaps my sister, I'll not stir; 
That known, I'll find scorpions to sting my whips, 
And fix her in a general eclipse." [Ea;eunt. 

If you consider the general level of Webster's 
writing, this rings almost childish. In The 
White Devil there are two instances of rhyming 
couplets close to each other, one superbly suc- 
cessful, the other a failure. The rather hideous 
and queerly vital wooing-scene between Brachi- 
ano and Vittoria leads up to a speech of the 
former's that ends: 

"You shall to me at once. 
Be dukedom, health, wife, children, friends, and all." 

Cornelia, Vittoria's mother, who has been listen- 
ing behind, unseen, breaks the tension with a 
rush forward and the cry: 

"Woe to light hearts, they still forerun our fall!" 

It has a Greek ring about it. It brings the fresh 
and terrible air of a larger moral world into the 
tiny passionate heat of that interview. And 
withal there is a run of fine music in the line. 
The rhyme helps all this materially. It enhances 
and marks the moment, and assists the play. But 
a dozen lines later, after some burning speeches 
of reproach in ordinary blank verse, Cornelia 



134 JOHN WEBSTER 

drops into rhyme again to show the moral of 
it all : 

"See, the curse of children! 
In life they keep us frequently in tears; 
And in the cold grave leave us in pale fears/* ^ 

The end of the play affords even more ex- 
traordinary examples of these couplets. Sand- 
wiched in between the dying Vittoria's tremen- 
dous 

"My soul, like a ship in a black storm^ 
Is driven, I know not whither," 

and Flamineo's equally fine sentence — an exam- 
ple of generalisation rightly and nobly used — 

"We cease to grieve, cease to be fortune's slaves. 
Nay, cease to die, by dying," 

comes the smug and dapper irrelevancy of 

"Prosperity doth bewitch men, seeming clear; 
But seas do laugh, show white, when rocks are near." 

It is beyond expression, the feeling of being let 
down, such couplets give one. 

In three places a different and very queer side 
of Webster's old-fashionedness or of his occa- 
sional dramatic insensibility, is unpleasantly 

^This couplet seems even absurder to us than it should, because 
the word "frequently" has since Webster got a rapid colloquial 
sense of "quite often." 



CHARACTERISTICS 135 

manifest. Here it becomes plainer, perhaps, that it 
is rather a childish than an old-fashioned tendency 
which betrays him to these faults. Three times, 
once in The White Devil, and twice in The Duch- 
ess of Malfi, the current of quick, living, realistic 
speeches — each character jerking out a hard, bit- 
ing, dramatic sentence or two — is broken by long- 
winded, irrelevant, and fantastically unrealistic 
tales. They are of a sententious, simple kind, 
such as might appear in j^Esop. Generally they 
seem to be lugged in by their ears into the play. 
They are introduced with the same bland, start- 
ling inconsequence with which some favourite 
song is brought into a musical comedy, but with 
immeasurably less justification. The instance in 
The White Devil is less bad than the others. 
Francisco is trying to stir Camillo against the 
indignity of horns. He suddenly tells him a long 
tale how Phoebus was going to be married, and 
the trades that don't like excessive heat made 
a deputation to Jupiter against the marriage, 
saying one sun was bad enough, they didn't want 
a lot of little ones. So, one Vittoria is bad 
enough ; it is a good thing there are no children. 
It is pointless and foolish enough, in such a play. 
But the instances in The Duchess of Malfi sur- 
pass it. In the tremendous scene in the bed- 
chamber when Ferdinand accuses the Duchess 



136 JOHN WEBSTER 

of her marriage, the mad frenzy of his reproaches 
is excellently rendered. She replies with short 
sentences, bursting from her heart. Each of his 
taunts carries flame. The whole is living, terse, 
and affecting. In the middle of this Ferdinand 
breaks into a long old-fashioned allegory about 
Love, Reputation, and Death, a tale that (but 
for a fine line or two) might have appeared in 
any Elizabethan collection of rhymed parables. 
The point of it is that Reputation is very easy 
to lose, and the Duchess has lost hers. It is as 
irrelevant and not so amusing as it would be if 
Michael Angelo had written a Christmas cracker 
posy on the scroll the Cumaean Sibyl holds. In 
the third instance the Duchess mars the end of 
a lovely and terrible scene (III. 5) by a would- 
be funny moral tale about a dogfish and a sal- 
mon. Here there is a sort of pathetic suitability 
in the Duchess, half broken with sorrow, almost 
unconsciously babbling childish tales to her ene- 
mies. But, with the other tales in mind, one 
finds it hard to believe Webster meant this. If 
he did, he did not bring his effect off. The tale 
is too incongruous with the rest of the scene. 

There are still further instances of Webster's 
occasional extraordinary childishness in drama, 
namely his shameless use of asides, soliloquies, 
and other devices for telling his audience the 



CHARACTERISTICS 137 

motives of the actors or the state of the plot. 
The Elizabethans were always rather careless. 
The indiscriminate soliloquy or aside were part 
of their inheritance, which they but gradually got 
rid of. If soliloquies, and even asides, are 
handled rightly, in a kind of drama like the 
Elizabethan, they need not be blemishes. They 
can add greatly to the play. Hamlet's solilo- 
quies do. The trend of recent dramatic art has 
been unwise in totally condemning this stage de- 
vice. There are two quite distinct effects of 
soliloquy in a play. One is to tell the audience 
the plot; the other is to let them see character or 
feel atmosphere. The first is bad, the second 
good. It is perfectly easy for an audience to ac- 
cept the convention of a man uttering his 
thoughts aloud. It is even based on a real occur- 
rence. When the man is alone on the stage it 
is an entirely simple and good convention. Even 
if there are other characters present, i.e. when the 
soliloquy approaches the aside, the trick only 
needs careful artistic handling. But the essen- 
tial condition is that the audience feels it is over- 
hearing the speaker, as much, at least, as it over- 
hears the dialogue of the play. In soliloquies 
or in dialogues the characters may, to a certain 
extent, turn outward to the audience, and ad- 
dress them ; in the same way as they forbear from 



138 JOHN WEBSTER 

often turning their backs on them. But solilo- 
quies must go no further. So far, they are ac- 
ceptable. If we can accept the extraordinary 
convention that a man's conversation shall be 
coherent, and in blank verse to boot, we can 
easily swallow his thoughts being communicated 
to us in the same way. It is only when the 
dramatist misuses this licence, and foists improb- 
able and unnaturally conscious thoughts on a 
man, in order to explain his plot, that we feel 
restive. The fault, of course, lies in the unnat- 
uralness and the shameless sudden appearance 
of the dramatist's own person, rather than in 
the form of a soliloquy. Only, soliloquies are es- 
pecially liable to this. A legitimate and superb 
use of soliloquy occurs near the end of The 
Duchess of Malfi, in a passage from which I 
have already quoted, where the Cardinal enters, 
alone, reading a book: 

"I am puzzled in a question about hell: 
He says_, in hell there's one material fire, 
And yet it shall not burn all men alike, 
Lay him by. 

— How tedious is a guilty conscience! 
When I look into the fish-pond in my garden, 
Methinks I see a thing arm'd with a rake. 
That seems to strike at me." 
[Enter Bosola and Servant bearing Antonio's hodyJ]^ 



CHARACTERISTICS 139 

This is an entirely permissible and successful 
use of soliloquy. The words and thought are 
mysteriously thrilling. They sharpen the agony 
of the spectator's mind to a tense expectation; 
which is broken by the contrast of the swift pur- 
pose of Bosola's entry, with the sei^ant and the 
body, and the violent progression of events en- 
suing. The whole is in tone together; and the 
eiFect bites deep, the feeling of the beginning of 
sheeting rain, breaking the gloomy pause before 
a thunderstorm. But there are cases of Webster 
using the soliloquy badly. In The White Devil, 
when the servant has told Francisco that Brachi- 
ano and Vittoria have fled the city together, he 
goes out. Francisco is left alone, exclaiming, 
"Fled! O, damnable!" He immediately alters 
his key: 

"How fortunate are my wishes ! Why, *twas this 
I only laboured! I did send the letter 
To instruct him what to do," etc., etc. 

One finds the dramatist rather too prominently 
and audibly there. But his presence becomes 
even more offensive when he is visible behind two 
characters and their dialogue, as in the instance 
from The DeviVs Law-Case, II. 1. A worse 
case of this, both in itself and because it comes in 
a tragedy, occurs in The White Devil, where 



140 JOHN WEBSTER 

Francisco and Monticelso explain their actions 
to each other, after Camillo, charged with the 
commission against the pirates, has made his 
exit. 

Francisco. "So, 'twas well fitted: now sliall we discern 

How his wish'd absence will give violent way 

To Duke Brachiano's lust." 
Monticelso. "Why, that was it; 

To what scorned purpose else should we make choice 

Of him for a sea-captain.^" etc. 

But having informed us of their motives in 
this, Webster suddenly remembers that we may 
say, "But why should they start on such a line 
of action at all?" So Monticelso, later in the 
conversation, apropos of nothing in particular^ 
remarks — 

**It may be objected, I am dishonourable 
To play thus with my kinsman; but I answer, 
For my revenge I'd stake a brother's life. 
That, being wrong'd, durst not avenge himself." 

A very similar instance of a pathetic attempt 
to make the audience swallow the plot, by care- 
fully explaining the motives, is in the fourth act 
of The Duchess of Malfi, a play distinctly less 
disfigured by these childishnesses of Webster's 
than The White Devil, There Ferdinand, in 
what purports to be a conversation with Bosola, 
goes back in his mind and rakes out, all unasked. 



CHARACTERISTICS 141 

his two motives for persecuting the Duchess. 
His behaviour, though badly portrayed, is less 
unconvincing and improbable than The White 
Devil instance. But such blunders make even 
the asides of Flamineo, when he is explaining his 
antic behaviour to the audience, flagrant as they 
are, seem mild and legitimate stage-devices. 

A special class of unrealistic asides and con- 
versations, and one very much affected by the 
Elizabethans, is the situation when A., B., and 
C. are on the stage, and B. and C. are carrying 
on a conversation, interspersed with asides be- 
tween A. and B. which C. does not notice. Peo- 
ple who have experience of the stage know how 
almost impossible this is to manage with any 
show of probability. In a comedy or farce the 
absurdity matters less. But the scene between 
Lodovico, Francisco, and Zanche, after Brachi- 
ano's death, though it partakes of farce, makes 
one uneasy. 

All these childishnesses and blunders in Web- 
ster's plays, soliloquies, asides, generalisations, 
couplets, and the rest, are due, no doubt, to care- 
lessness and technical incapacity. His gifts were 
of a different kind. But the continual general- 
isations arise also from a particular bent of his 
mind, and a special need he felt. It is normal in 



142 JOHN WEBSTER 

the human mind, it was unusually strong in the 
Elizabethans, and it found its summit in Webster 
of all of that time — the desire to discover the 
general rule your particular instance illustrates, 
and the delight of enunciating it. Many people 
find their only intellectual pleasure in life, in the 
continued practice of this. But drama seems, 
or seemed, to demand it with especial hunger; 
most of all the poetic drama. The Greeks felt 
this, and in the form of drama they developed 
this was one of the chief intellectual functions of 
the chorus. I say "intellectual," meaning that 
in their music and movement they appealed 
through other channels to the audience — though 
here, too, in part, to something the same taste 
in the audience, that is to say, the desire to feel 
a little disjunct from the individual case, and 
to view it against some sort of background. 
Metre itself has, psychologically, the same effect, 
a little. But the brain demands to be told ^o fxrj 

or any of the other deductions and rules. 

The Greeks, then, received, to their satisfac- 
tion, the knowledge of other instances or of the 
general rule or moral, from the chorus. It is 
interesting to see the various ways of achieving 
the effects of a chorus that later drama has used. 
For to some extent the need is always felt. 



CHARACTERISTICS 143 

though not violently enough to overcome the 
dramatic disadvantages of an actual chorus. 
Sometimes one character in a play is put aside 
to serve the purpose, like the holy man in Max- 
im Gorki's The Lower Depths, Or the char- 
acters sit down and, a little unrealistically, argue 
out their moral, as in Mr. Shaw's plays. JNIr. 
Shaw and a good many modern German, Eng- 
lish, and Scandinavian writers, also depend on 
the spectator having picked up, from prefaces 
and elsewhere, the general body of the author's 
views against the background of which any par- 
ticular play is to be performed. Ibsen had two 
devices. One was to sum up the matter in some 
prominent and startling remark near the end, 
like the famous "People don't do such things!" 
The other was to have a half-mystical back- 
ground, continually hinted at; the mountain- 
mines in John 'Gabriel Borkman, the heights in 
When We Dead Awaken, the sea in The Lady 
from the Sea, the wild duck. In certain catch- 
words these methods met; "homes for men and 
women," "ghosts," "you don't mean it!" and the 
rest. The temptation to point a moral in the 
last words of a play is almost irresistible; and 
sometimes justified. A well-known modern play 
called Waste ends, "the waste! the waste of it 
all!" The Elizabethans were very fond of doing 



144 JOHN WEBSTER 

this. They had the advantage that they could 
end with a rhymed couplet. But they were liable 
to do it at the end of any scene or episode. It 
has been pointed out how much Webster was 
addicted to this practice. Towards their close 
his plays became a string of passionate generali- 
ties. Antonio and Vittoria both die uttering 
warnings against "the courts of princes." Other 
characters alternate human cries at their own 
distress with great generalisations about life and 
death. These give to the hearts of the spectators 
such comfort and such an outlet for their con- 
fused pity and grief as music and a chorus afford 
in other cases. But Webster also felt the need 
of such broad moralising in the middle of his 
tragedies. Sometimes he pours through the 
mouth of such characters as Bosola and Fla- 
mineo, generalisation after dull generalisation, 
without illuminating. Greek choruses have 
failed in the same way. But when a gnome that 
is successful comes, it is worth the pains. The 
solidity and immensity of Webster's mind behind 
the incidents is revealed. Flamineo fills this part 
at the death of Brachiano. But often he and 
Bosola are a different, and very Websterian, cho- 
rus. Their ceaseless comments of indecency and 
mockery are used in some scenes to throw up by 
contrast and enhance by interpretation the pas- 



CHARACTERISTICS 145 

sions and sufferings of human beings. They pro- 
vide a background for Prometheus; but a back- 
ground of entrails and vultures, not the cliffs 
of the Caucasus. The horror of suffering is in- 
tensified by such means till it is unbearable. The 
crisis of her travail comes on the tormented body 
and mind of the Duchess (II. 1) to the swift 
accompaniment of Bosola's mockery. Brachi- 
ano's wooing, and his later recapture, of Vittoria, 
take on the sick dreadfulness of figures in a 
nightmare, whose shadows parody them with ob- 
scene caricature; because of the ceaseless ape- 
like comments of Flamineo, cold, itchy, filthily 
knowing. 

Light has interestingly been thrown of late on 
Webster's method of composition. It had long 
been known that he repeats a good many lines 
and phrases from himself and from other peo- 
ple: and that a great deal of his writing, espe- 
cially in his best and most careful work, has the 
air of being proverbial, or excerpt. John Ad- 
dington Symonds remarked with insight a good 
many years ago that Webster must have used 
a note-book. His plays read like it. And now 
Mr. Crawford has discovered some of the sources 
he compiled his note-book from.^ 

* Crawford, Collectanea, i. 20-46, ii. 1-63. 



146 JOHN WEBSTER 

It would be useless to repeat Mr. Crawford's 
list with a few additions, or to examine the in- 
stances one by one. Nearly, not quite, all his 
cases seem to me to be real ones. There are cer- 
tainly quite enough to enable one to draw impor- 
tant inferences about Webster's way of working. 
These instances of borrowing are very numerous, 
and chiefly from two books, Sidney's Arcadia, 
and Montaigne — favourite sources of Eliza- 
bethan wisdom. They are very clearly marked, 
and consist in taking striking thoughts and 
phrases in the original, occasionally quite long 
ones, and rewriting them almost verbally, some- 
times with slight changes to make them roughly 
metrical. It is a quite different matter from the 
faint "parallels" of ordinary commentators. I 
give one of the more striking instances, to illus- 
trate: 

Arcadia, Bk. II.: 



"But she, as if he had spoken of a small matter 
when he mentioned her life, to which she had not 
leisure to attend, desired him, if he loved her, to 
shew it in finding some way to save Antiphilus, For 
her, she found the world but a wearisome stage 
unto her, where she played a part against her will, 
and therefore besought him not to cast his love 
in so unfruitful a place as could not love it- 
self. . . ." 



CHARACTERISTICS 147 

Arcadia, Bk. III.: 

"It happened, at that time upon his bed, towards 
the dawning of the day, he heard one stir in his 
chamber, by the motion of garments, and with an 
angry voice asked who was there. 'A poor gentle- 
woman,' answered the party, 'that wish long life 
unto you.' 'And I soon death unto you,' said he, 
'for the horrible curse you have given me.' " 

The Duchess of Malfi, IV. 1 (p. 85) : 

Duchess. "Who must dispatch me? 

I account this world a tedious theatre 

For I do play a part in't 'gainst my will." 
BosoLA. "Come, be of comfort; I will save your life." 
Duchess. "Indeed, I have not leisure to tend 

So small a business." 
BosoLA. "Now, by my life, I pity you." 
Duchess. "Thou art a fool, then. 

To waste thy pity on a thing so wretched 

As cannot pity itself. I am full of daggers. 

Puff, let me blow these vipers from me! 

What are you?" 

Enter Servant. 
Servant. "One that wishes you long life." 
Duchess. "I would thou wert hang'd for the horrible 
curse 

Thou hast given me." ^ 

There are three explanations of all this. 
Either Webster knew the Arcadia so well that 
he had a lot of it by heart. Or he had the book 
and worked from it. Or he kept a note-book, 
into which he had entered passages that struck 
him, and which he used to write the play from. 



148 JOHN WEBSTER 

It seems to me certain that the third is the true 
explanation. We know that Elizabethan authors 
did sometimes keep note-books in this way. Ba- 
con did so, and Ben Jonson, whom Webster ad- 
mired and rather resembled, worked most me- 
thodically this way. The memory theory could 
scarcely explain the verbal accuracy of so many 
passages. But there are other considerations, 
which make the note-book probable. The pas- 
sages from the Arcadia or from Montaigne came 
very often in lumps. You will get none, or only 
one or two, for some scenes, and then twenty 
lines or so that are a cento of them, carefully 
dovetailed and worked together. It is very diffi- 
cult to imagine a man doing this from memory 
or from a book. But it is exactly what would 
happen if he were using a note-book which had 
several consecutive pages with Arcadia extracts, 
several more with Montaigne, and so on. The 
passage I quoted, which brings together an ex- 
tract from Arcadia,, III., and another from Ar- 
cadia, II., exemplifies this. But there are better 
instances. The first ten lines of The Duchess of 
Malfi, IV. 1 (p. 84), contain three continuous 
more or less verbal thefts from different parts 
of the Arcadia J the first and third from Book II., 
the second from Book I. Better still; in II. 1 
(p. 67) , Bosola has to utter some profound "con- 



CHARACTERISTICS 149 

templation," worthy of his malcontent type. 
Webster could not think of anything at the mo- 
ment. He generally seems to have had recourse 
to his note-book when he was gravelled ; for a lot 
of his borrowed passages make very little sense 
as they come in, and that of a rather sudden na- 
ture, in the way that generally betokens an in- 
terrupted train of thought. He went to his note- 
books on this occasion. He found, probably con- 
tiguous there, several sentences of a weighty, dis- 
connected sense. They are from Montaigne, 
Florio's translation, pages 246, 249, 248, in that 
order.^ Put together they have, as a matter of 
fact, very little meaning. 

BosoLA. "O, Sir, the opinion of wisdom is a foul 
tetter that runs all over a man's body; if sim- 
plicity direct us to have no evil it directs us to 
a happy being; for the subtlest folly proceeds 
from the subtlest wisdom ; let me be simply hon- 
est." 

Still, it did. And being at his Montaigne note- 
books, Webster went on. Bosola's next speech 
but one borrows from the first Book. For the 
long speech that follows it, he goes back to Book 
II.; and makes it entirely from two different 
passages, one on p. 239, one on p. 299. 

A last instance is still more convincing. It 

* Professor Henry Morley's reprint. 



150 JOHN WEBSTER 

concerns A Monumental Column, lines 23-35, 
and The Duchess of Malfi, III. 2 (p. 79), the 
description of Antonio. The first passage is 
mostly taken verbally from the two sources, Ben 
Jonson's Dedication to A Masque of Queens and 
the description of Musidorus in Arcadia, Book I. 
The passage in the play contains one of the 
same lines from Jonson, together with a different 
part of the sentence describing Musidorus, and 
a couple of lines from another part of Arcadia, 
Book I. And the remainder of the description 
of Musidorus duly turns up in The Duchess of 
Malfi a few scenes later, in IV. 1 (p. 84), sand- 
wiched between two passages from Arcadia, 
Book II. 

A good many of these passages Webster cop- 
ied out identically, except sometimes for a few 
changes to make them go into rough verse. 
Others he altered in very interesting ways. It 
was not necessarily part of his goodness as an 
author to alter them. His genius comes out 
equally in the phrases he used to produce far 
greater effect than they do in the original, by 
putting them at some exactly suitable climax. 
We are getting beyond the attitude, born of the 
industrial age and the childish enthusiasm for 
property as such, which condemns such plagiar- 
ism, imitation, and borrowing. The Elizabethans 



CHARACTERISTICS 151 

had for the most part healthy and sensible views 
on the subject. They practised and encouraged 
the habit. When Langbaine, in his preface to 
Momus Triumphans^ "condemns Plagiaries" 
(though he is only thinking of plots, even then), 
it is a sign of the decadence towards stupidity. 
The poet and the dramatist work with words, 
ideas, and phrases. It is ridiculous, and shows 
a wild incomprehension of the principles of lit- 
erature, to demand that each should only use his 
own ; every man's brain is filled by thoughts and 
words of other people's. Webster wanted to 
make Bosola say fine things. He had many 
in his mind or his note-book : some were borrowed, 
some his own. He put them down, and they an- 
swer their purpose splendidly. 

**I stand like one 
That long hath ta'en a sweet and golden dream; 
I am angry with myself, now that I wake/* 

That was, or may have been, of his own inven- 
tion. 

"The weakest arm is strong enough that strikes 
With the sword of justice." 

That he had found in Sidney. There is no dif- 
ference. In any case the first, original, passage 
was probably in part due to his friends' influ- 
ence; and the words he used were originally 



152 JOHN WEBSTER 

wholly "plagiarised" from his mother or his 
nurse-maid. "Originality" is only plagiarising 
from a great many. 

So Webster reset other people's jewels and 
redoubled their lustre. "The soul must be held 
fast with one's teeth . . ." he found Mon- 
taigne remarkably saying in a stoical passage. 
The phrase stuck. Bosola, on the point of death. 



cries : ^ 



"Yes I hold my weary soul in my teeth; 
'Tis ready to part from me." 

It is unforgettable. 

Webster improved even Donne, in this way; 
in a passage of amazing, quiet, hopeless pathos, 
the parting of Antonio and the Duchess (Duch- 
ess of Malfi, III. 5), which is one long series of 
triumphant borrowings: 

"We seem ambitious God's whole work to undo; 
Of nothing He made us, and we strive too 
To bring ourselves to nothing back," 

Donne writes in An Anatomy of the World. 

"Heaven fashion'd us of nothing; and we strive 
To bring ourselves to nothing," 

are Antonio's moving words. 

* It is only because there are scores of other certain borrowings 
of Webster from Montaigne that I accept this one. By itself it 
would not be a convincing plagiarism. 



CHARACTERISTICS 153 

This last example illustrates one kind of the 
changes other than metrical Webster used to 
make. He generally altered a word or two, 
with an extraordinarily sure touch, which proves 
his genius for literature. He gave the passages 
life and vigour, always harmonious with his own 
style. You see, by this chance side-light, the 
poet at work, with great vividness. "Fashion'd" 
for "made" here, is not a great improvement; 
but it brings the sentence curiously into the key 
of the rest of the scene. The metrical skill is 
astounding — the calm weight of "fashion'd"; the 
slight tremble of "Heaven" at the beginning of 
the line ; the adaptation from Donne's stiff heavy 
combative accent, the line ending with "and we 
strive too," to the simpler easier cadence more 
suited to speech and to pathos, "... ; and we 
strive"; and the repetition of "nothing" in the 
same place in the two lines. 

The long first example I gave of borrowing 
from Sidney gives good instances of change, 
among others the half-slangy vividness of 

"Thou art a fool, then. 
To waste thy pity on a thing so wretched 
As cannot pity itself . . . ," 

for Sidney's mannered, dim, 

"and therefore besought him not to cast his 
love in so unfruitful a place as could not love itself/* 



154 JOHN WEBSTER 

But the same places in The Duchess of Malfi 
and the Arcadia have a much finer example. The 
description of Queen Erona is transferred to the 
Duchess again. Sidney says that in her sorrow, 
one could "perceive the shape of loveliness more 
perfectly in v^^oe than in joyfulness." Webster 
turned this, with a touch, to poetry in its sheerest 
beauty. 

BosoLA. "You may discern the shape of loveliness 

More perfect in her tears than in her smiles.** 

It is just this substitution of the concrete for 
the abstract — which is the nearest one could get 
to a definition of the difference between a thought 
in good prose and the same thought in good 
poetry — ^that Webster excels in. Even where his 
adjectives gain, it is in this direction. 

"Or is it true that thou wert never but a vain 
name, and no essential thing?" 

says Sidney in a long passage on Virtue. Web- 
ster makes it a shade more visual, and twenty 
times as impressive: 

"Or is it true thou art but a bare name. 
And no essential thing?" 

So Bosola gives life to a meditation of Mon- 
taigne. Montaigne's democratic mind pondered 



CHARACTERIS7:iCS 155 

in his study on the essential equality of men. 
"We are deceived," he says of princes; "they are 
moved, stirred, and removed in their motions by 
the same springs and wards that we are in ours. 
The same reason that makes us chide and brawl 
and fall out with any of our neighbours, causeth 
a war to follow between princes ; the same reason 
that makes us whip or beat a lackey maketh a 
prince (if he apprehend it) to spoil and waste a 
whole province. ..." Bosola is the heart of 
democracy. "They are deceived, there's the same 
hand to them; the like passions sway them; the 
same reason that makes a vicar to go to law for 
a tithe-pig, and undo his neighbours, makes them 
spoil a whole province, and batter down goodly 
cities with the cannon." The tithe-pig carries 
you on to Parnassus; Bosola has the vision of an 
artist. 

The liveliness of the "there's" for "there is" 
in the last quotation is typical. Webster, like all 
the great Elizabethans, knew he was writing for 
the ear and not the eye. They kept in close 
touch, in their phrases, rhythms, and turns, with 
speech. Their language was greater than speech, 
but it was in that kind ; it was not literature. 

But there is one example of adoption and 
adaptation where Webster stands out quite clear 
as the poet, with the queer and little-known men- 



156 JCHN WEBSTER 

tal processes of that kind of man suddenly 
brought to the hght. Montaigne has a passage: 

"Forasmuch as our sight, being altered, repre- 
sents unto itself things alike ; and we imagine that 
things fail it as it doth to them: As they who 
travel by sea, to whom mountains, fields, towns, 
heaven, and earth, seem to go the same motion, 
and keep the same course they do." 

The sense is clear and on the surface. He is 
illustrating the general rule by an interesting 
instance from ordinary experience. When you 
go in a train, or a boat, the sky, the earth, and 
its various features, all seem to be moving in one 
direction.^ In The White Devil Flamineo is 
tempting Vittoria with the happiness Brachiano 
can give her. 

"So perfect shall be thy happiness, that, as men 
at sea think land and trees and ships ^o that way 
they go, so both heaven and earth shall seem to go 
your voyage." 

Webster took this instance of Montaigne's and 
used it to help out quite a different sense. He 
used it as a simile of that elusive, unobvious, im- 
aginative kind that illuminates the more that you 
can scarcely grasp the point of comparison. But 

* Note, though, that Montaigne has made a slip. They really 
appear to be moving in the opposite direction to yourself. Web- 
ster takes the idea over, mistake and all. 



CHARACTERIS i JCS 157 

he did more. He was led to it by thinking, as a 
poet thinks, only half in ideas and half in words. 
Or rather, with ordinary people, ideas lead to 
one another, suggest one another, through ideas. 
With poets they do it through words, quite illogi- 
cally. The paths of association in the brain are 
different in the two cases. A word is an idea 
with an atmosphere, a hard core with a fringe 
round it, like an oyster with a beard, or Profes- 
sor William James' conception of a state of 
mind. Poets think of the fringes, other people 
of the core only. More definitely, if the diction- 
ary meaning of a word is a and the atmosphere 
cc, the poet thinks of it as ( oo + a) , and his trains 
of thought are apt to go on accordingly. So 
here, Webster found, vaguely, "heaven and 
earth" . . . "going the same motion" . . . and 
he leapt to the mystical conception of supreme 
happiness. He took "heaven and earth" from 
their original, half material, significance, and 
transfigured them. He took them from the illus- 
tration and put them into the thing illus- 
trated. The meaning of the original suggested 
one thing to his mind, the words another; he 
combined them, in another world. And the re- 
sult is a simile of incomprehensible appropriate- 
ness and exquisite beauty, an idea in a Shelleyan 
altitude where words have various radiance rather 



158 JOHN WEBSTER 

than meaning, an amazing description of the 
sheer summit of the ecstasy of joy. 

The note-book habit suited those idiosyncrasies 
of Webster's slow-moving mind which distin- 
guished him from the ready rhetoric of Fletcher 
and the perpetual inspiration of Shakespeare. 
The use of such a thing by a poet implies a dif- 
ference from other poets in psychology, not, as 
is often ignorantly supposed, in degree of merit. 
It merely means he has a worse memory. All 
writers are continually noting or inventing 
phrases and ideas, which form the stuff from 
which their later inspiration chooses. Some have 
to note them down, else they slip away for ever. 
Others can note them in their mind and yet feel 
secure of retaining them. The advantage of this 
method is that you unconsciously transmute all 
^'borrowed" ideas to harmony with your own per- 
sonality — that when you hunt them out to re- 
claim them you find them slightly changed. The 
disadvantage, under modern conditions, is that 
you may commit the most terrible sin of plagiar- 
ism, and lift another man's work, and display it 
in a recognisable form, without knowing it. So 
Meredith in one of his last and best lyrics, an 
eight-lined poem called "Youth and Age,'' re- 
peats a line identically from Swinburne's best 
poem, The Triumph of Time; and all uncon- 



CHARACTERISTICS 159 

sciously. The disadvantage of the note-book 
method is that you have to perform the operation 
of digesting your trophy, harmonising it with the 
rest of the work, on the spot. Webster does not 
always do this successfully. There are passages, 
as we have seen, where he too flagrantly helps 
himself along with his note-book. But as a rule 
he weaves in his quotations extraordinarily well; 
they become part of the texture of the play, 
adding richness of hue and strength of fabric. 
In The White Devil, in the scene of astounding 
tragical farce where Flamineo persuades Vittoria 
and Zanche to try to murder him with bulletless 
pistols, the quotations from Montaigne come in 
entirely pat. For it is not, generally, when the 
play goes slowest that Webster has most recourse 
to his note-book. The swift passion of Ferdi- 
nand's interview with the guilty Duchess {Duch- 
ess of Malfi, III. 2) is, if you enquire closely, 
entirely composed of slightly altered passages 
from the Arcadia. This detracts no whit from 
its tumultuous force. 

The chief value of working through a note- 
book, from a literary point of view, is this. A 
man tends to collect quotations, phrases, and 
ideas, that particularly appeal to and fit in with 
his own personality. If that personality is a 
strong one, and the point of his work is the 



160 JOHN WEBSTER 

pungency with which it is imbued with this strong 
taste, the not too injudicious agglutination of 
these external fragments will vastly enrich and 
heighten the total effect. And this is, on the 
whole, what happens with Webster. The heap- 
ing-up of images and phrases helps to confuse 
and impress the hearer, and gives body to a taste 
that might otherwise have been too thin to carry. 
Webster, in fine, belongs to the caddis-worm 
school of writers, who do not become their com- 
plete selves until they are incrusted with a thou- 
sand orts and chips and fragments from the 
world around. 

It would be possible to go on for a long time 
classifying various characteristics of Webster, 
and discovering them in diff*erent passages or 
incidents in his plays. And it would be possible, 
too, to lay one's finger on several natural reac- 
tions and permanent associations in that brain. 
All have noticed his continual brooding over 
death. He was, more particularly, obsessed by 
the idea of the violence of the moment of death. 
Soul and body appeared to him so interlaced that 
he could not conceive of their separation without 
a struggle and pain. Again, his mind was al- 
ways turning to metaphors of storms and bad 
weather, and especially the phenomenon of light- 



CHARACTERISTICS 161 

ning. He is for ever speaking of men lightening 
to speech or action; he saw words as the flash 
from the thunder-cloud of wrath or passion. 

But, after all, the chief characteristic of Web- 
ster's two plays and of many things in those 
plays, is that they are good; and the chief char- 
acteristic of Webster is that he is a good drama- 
tist. The great thing about The Duchess of 
Malfi is that it is the material for a superb play; 
the great thing about the fine or noble things in 
it is not that they illustrate anything or belong 
to any class, but, in each case, the fine and noble 
thing itself. All one could do would be to print 
them out at length ; and this is no place for that ; 
it is easier to buy Webster's Works (though, in 
this scandalous country, not very easy). The 
end of the matter is that Webster was a great 
writer; and the way in which one uses great 
writers is two-fold. There is the exhilarating 
way of reading their writing; and there is the 
essence of the whole man, or of the man's whole 
work, which you carry away and permanently 
keep with you. This essence generally presents 
itself more or less in the form of a view of the 
universe, recognisable rather by its emotional 
than by its logical content. The world called 
Webster is a peculiar one. It is inhabited by 
people driven, like animals, and perhaps like 



162 JOHN WEBSTER 

men, only by their instincts, but more blindly 
and ruinously. Life there seems to flow into its 
forms and shapes with an irregular abnormal and 
horrible volume. That is ultimately the most 
sickly, distressing feature of Webster's charac- 
ters, their foul and indestructible vitality. It fills 
one with the repulsion one feels at the unending 
soulless energy that heaves and pulses through 
the lowest forms of life. They kill, love, torture 
one another blindly and without ceasing. A 
play of Webster's is full of the feverish and 
ghastly turmoil of a nest of maggots. Maggots 
are what the inhabitants of this universe most 
suggest and resemble. The sight of their fever 
is only alleviated by the permanent calm, un- 
friendly summits and darknesses of the back- 
ground of death and doom. For that is equally 
a part of Webster's universe. Human beings 
are writhing grubs in an immense night. And 
the night is without stars or moon. But it has 
sometimes a certain quietude in its darkness; 
but not very much. 



APPENDICES. 



Appendix A. — "Appius and Virginia" 

[The original form of this appendix was rearranged 
and shortened by the author for separate publication 
in the Modern Languages Review, vol. viii. No. 4 ( Octo- 
ber, 1913). I have here combined the two versions, fol- 
lowing the order of the second, but restoring most of 
the passages which were omitted from it to save space. 

E. M.] 



THE AUTHORSHIP OF THE LATER 
"APPIUS AND VIRGINIA." ^ 

It is startlingly obvious, and has been remarked by 
every critic of Webster, that Appius and Virginia is 
quite different from his other plays. It "stands apart 
from the other plays," says Professor Vaughan.^ Dr. 
Ward recognises it as a work of Webster's "later man- 
hood, if not of his old age." Mr. William Archer vastly 
prefers it to the ordinary crude Websterian melodrama. 
In fact, critics, whether of the Elizabethans in general 
or of Webster in particular, have always exhibited 
either conscious discomfort or unconscious haste and 
lack of interest, when they came to this play. As they 
have never questioned its authenticity, their perfunc- 
tory and unprofitable treatment of it is noteworthy. 
They cannot fit it in. In summing up Webster's charac- 
teristics, they have either quietly let it slide out of sight, 
or else brought it formally and unhelpfully in, to sit 
awkward and silent among the rest like a deaf unpleas- 
ant aunt at a party of the other side of the family. But 
never, so far as I am aware, has anyone suggested that 
it is not by Webster. 

We may sympathise with the critics. The more 
closely Appius and Virginia is looked at, the less it 
shows of the Webster we know. With Northward Ha 

*The only other Appius and Virginia known is the old-fashioned 
lumbering play by "R. B." (probably Richard Bower) of 1576. 
» C. H. E. L., vol. vi, p. 182. 

165 



166 JOHN WEBSTER 

and Westward Ho, one is not discomforted at finding 
almost no such mark. You may imagine Webster a 
young man, collaborating with an older, in a well- 
defined, not very congenial, type of play, contributing 
the smaller part. There are a hundred reasons against 
what we mean by Webster being prominent in those 
plays. Anyhow, a young man's work is frequently any- 
body's ; especially his hack-work. Who could pick out 
Meredith's war correspondence from anyone else's ? But 
once he has developed his particular savour, it can 
hardly fade into commonness again. It is as with faces. 
You can often mistake two young faces. But once the 
soul has got to work, wrinkling and individualising the 
countenance, it remains itself for ever, even after the 
soul has gone. The taste we recognise as Webster de- 
veloped between 1607 and 1615. It is a clinging, un- 
mistakable one. Later on he imitated models who pro- 
voked it less powerfully. But a close, long scrutiny, 
before which Appius and Virginia grows more cold and 
strange, increasingly reveals Webster in The DetnUs 
Law-Case, even in A Cure for a Cuckold, of which he 
only wrote part. 

Examine Appius and Virginia aesthetically and as 
a whole. Webster is a dogged, slow writer, and roman- 
tic — in the sense that single scenes, passages, or lines 
have merit and intensity on their own account. As a 
rule, he finely proves that quintessence of the faith that 
the God of Romanticism revealed to his inattentive 
prophet. "Load every rift with ore." And there is a 
kind of dusty heat over all. Appius and Virginia is 
precisely the opposite. Its impression is simple and 
cool. It seems more an effort at classicism — uncon- 



APPENDICES 167 

scious perhaps. There are not many lines or images 
you stop over. You see right to the end of the road. 
It is, of course, a very poor argument against at- 
tributing a play to any particular author, that he has 
not written this kind of play elsewhere. The very fact 
that he hasn't, makes it all the harder to know what 
his attempt in this manner would be like. And when 
such an argument is used, as it is, to prove that A 
Yorkshire Tragedy is not Shakespeare's, it is of no 
value, though it may be on the right side. What is 
permissible, however, is, when a writer has several dis- 
tinct characteristics, to expect to recognise some of 
them, when he is seriously attempting a kind of play 
not very different from his ordinary one; especially if 
these characteristics are of certain kinds. A mere jour- 
nalist, turning out his daily task, may sometimes write 
an indistinguishable undistinguished play in a different 
style. A great master of a certain type may possibly;, 
his tongue just perceptibly bulging the cheek, flash out 
something quite good in an entirely other kind, as a tour 
de force. Or a very brilliant and not at all serious per- 
son, with a trick of writing, some Grcecidus of literature, 
may sink his own personality entirely in the manner of 
another. But that is only possible if he is able to aim 
entirely at parody, and not at all at art. Few artists 
could ever do this. In any case, Webster and Appkis 
and Virginia do not fit into any of these potential ex- 
planations. He worked (as he tells us, and we can see) 
slowly and with trouble. Both his method and the result 
show that he was no easily adaptable writer. His 
clumsy, individual, passionate form betrays itself under 
borrowed clothes. This does not mean that he strode 



168 JOHN WEBSTER 

always intensely and unswervingly along his own path. 
He was, in an odd way, ready enough to put on other 
people's clothes that did not suit him. But they never 
fitted all over. It is suggested that in Appius and Vir- 
gi/nia he was trying to imitate Shakespeare's Roman 
tragedies. This might explain the absence of some of 
his peculiarities, and the presence of other marks ; the 
change of atmosphere, the greater number of rhyming 
lines, and so forth. But subtler questions of metre and 
vocabulary go deeper, in proportion as they are more 
unconscious. Consideration of such delicate points, to- 
gether with a careful general aesthetic tasting of the 
whole play, seem to me to warrant a very strong critical 
doubt whether Webster wrote Appius and Virginia, 

The characters of the play are slight and ordinary. 
The clown is quite unlike anything we could expect Web- 
ster to invent. Appius, the Machiavellian villain, has a 
little fire. Virginius is a mere stage-creature, and, as 
that, quite creditable. Virginia is a virgin. The crowd 
of soldiers is a soldiers' crowd. Webster's characters, 
in other plays, if they do not always (compared at least 
with Shakespeare's) make a highly individual impres- 
sion on the mind, always leave a dent. 

The metre of Appius and Virginia is not Webster's. 
The blank verse is much stricter. Webster's loose, im- 
pressionistic iambics, with their vague equivalence and 
generous handling, are very unlike these regular, rhe- 
torical lines. Webster's great characteristic of begin- 
ning a line with what classical prosodists would call 
an anapaest finds no place here. And the general metri- 
cal technique of which this is only the most obvious 
manifestation — the continual use of substitution and 



APPENDICES 169 

equivalence in the feet, or, better, the thinking more in 
lines and less in feet ^ — is strikingly absent in Appms 
and Virginia. These prosodic habits are also almost as 
little prominent in the possibly Websterian part of 
A Cure for a Cuckold. But there is another point 
which marks Appius and Virginia off from all the rest. 
In the other plays, there is little attempt to keep a line 
that is divided between two speakers pentametrical. If 
one speech ends with a line of two and a half feet, the 
next may begin with a line of two feet, or of three, or 
with a complete line. Appius and Virginia keeps al- 
most invariably to the old tradition, by which the 
speeches dovetail perfectly.^ 

The first and almost the only characteristic in this 
play to strike a casual reader, is the vocabulary. It 
is full of rare Latin words, mostly wearing an air of 
recent manufacture; "to deject" (in a literal sense), 
"munition," "invasive," "devolved," "donative," 
"palped," "enthronised," "torved," "strage," and 
many more. This particular vocabulary is a mark of 
certain writers, especially of the period at the end of 
the sixteenth and beginning of the seventeenth cen- 

^E. g. Duchess of Malf, III. 2: 

"Did you ever in your life know an ill painter 
Desire to have his dwelling next door to the shop 
Of an excellent picture maker?" 
' For the perplexing metrical part which Appius and Virginia 
plays, see the metrical table on p. 190 of Dr. StoU's John Webster. 
Its resemblance to A Cure for a Cuckold is only in some direc- 
tions, and more statistical than real. The metre of both is rather 
smooth; but in a very different way. It is, of course, rather 
risky to lay much emphasis on A Cure for a Cuckold: it may have 
been worked over by Rowley. 



170 JOHN WEBSTER 

turies, which had a joyous fertility in inventing new 
words that soon drooped and grew sterile. It was 
mostly employed by the slightly classicist authors. Of 
the major dramatists, Ben Jonson had a touch of it; 
Marston, Heywood, Chapman, and Shakespeare show 
it chiefly. Shakespeare has this variety among all his 
other varieties, neologisms, and aTra^ Xeyo/zeva : Chap- 
man and Heywood this in especial. 

In this and every notable respect the language of 
Appius and Virginia is unlike Webster's. Whatever 
linguistic point of detail you choose, the lack of re- 
semblance is obvious. To take one instance: Dr. StoU 
(p. 40), in trying to prove the Webster authorship of 
the major part of A Cure for a Cuckold, uses as a test 
the occurrence of the exclamation "Ha !" especially as 
comprehending a whole speech. He says it is unusually 
frequent in Webster. "It appears in The White Devil 
thirteen times, six of them being whole speeches ; in 
Malfi ten times, two of them whole speeches ; in the 
Law-Case nine times, four of them whole speeches; in 
Appius and Virginia twice ; in the main plot of the Cure 
for a Cuckold seven times, two of them whole speeches." 
The oddness of the Appius and Virgvnia figures does 
not strike Dr. Stoll, who is on other business. He ex- 
plains them, vaguely, by "the frigidity and academic 
character of the play"; which is far from fair to the 
slightly Marlovian and "Machiavellian" nature of much 
of Appius and Virginia. It is not a Jonsonian Roman 
play. There is no reason why Appius should not have 



APPENDICES 171 

said "Ha!" thirteen times, six of them whole speeches, 
except that the author did not write like that. 

Again, the word "foul" was, characteristically, a 
common one with Webster. It occurs often in The 
White Devily on almost every page in The Ducliess of 
Malft. "Think on your cause," says Contarino to 
Ercole in The DeviVs Law-Case, II. 2; "It is a won- 
drous foul one." And when the real "devil's law-case" 
comes on (IV. 2), the shameless Winifred desires, 
"Question me in Latin, for the cause is very foul." 
There was this habit in Webster of thinking of such 
moral rottenness as "foul," slightly materialising it. A 
reader would feel safe in betting that Webster would 
use the word several times in connection with the trial 
of Virginia. One knows his comment on it, as one 
knows how a friend will take a piece of news. The 
word does not occur in this passage. 

Analysis might find a thousand more points, positive 
and negative, in which the style and vocabulary of 
Appius and Virginia are obviously not those of Web- 
ster. The dissimilarity becomes still more obvious 
when the language is unanalytically tasted as a whole. 
It is throughout rhetorical and easy, with a slight 
permanent artificiality. The style is rather imitative 
of Shakespeare's, and alive, but not kicking. 

In the general construction and handling of the 
play there is an un-Websterian childishness and crud- 
ity. Webster could be gauche enough at times, but 
not in this shallow, easy way. I need only enumerate 
some of the instances. 



172 JOHN WEBSTER 

The Elizabethans were splendidly unsubservient to 
time. But the better dramatists tended to conceal their 
freedom; Webster among them. The keenest-witted 
spectator of A Midsummer Nighfs Dream or The Mer- 
chant of Venice could not, unless he were looking for 
them, discern the tricks Shakespeare has played with 
time. The instance in Appius and Virginia is far more 
flagrant, though it might strike an Elizabethan less 
than us. Act V. scene 3 takes place in the prison. 
Icilius, seeing Virginius relent towards Appius, vanishes 
to fetch the body of Virginia. Seven lines after his 
exit, a shout is heard. It turns out that in this time 
Icilius has gone through the streets to where Virginia 
is lying, taken up the body, and started back through 
the streets carrying it; and the people have begun to 
make an uproar. Eleven lines later, Icilius enters with 
the body. If the play stands as it was written, it is 
difficult to believe that Webster could have committed 
such absurdities. They might possibly, but not prob- 
ably, be explained by a theory, for which there is other 
evidence, that we have the play in a cut and revised 
state.-^ But nothing can be thought too childish to 
come from the author of the crowd-effects in Act II. 2, 
where the First Soldier asks : 

Soldiers, shall I relate the grievances 
Of the whole regiment .f* 

You might expect Omnes to answer "Yes !" or "No !" 
if they were all agreed. It is too startling when, with 
* See page 200. 



APPENDICES 173 

one voice, they cry "Boldly !" But a more amazing in- 
stance of sympathy and intelligence follows. The First 
Soldier ends a piece of rhetoric with: 

from thence arise 
A plague to choke all Rome ! 
Omnes. And all the suburbs ! 

There is a childishness that goes deeper, in the hand- 
ling of the plot and episodes. It is all told with a 
forthright and unthinking simplicity that is quite dif- 
ferent from any Chapmanesque stark directness ; the 
simplicity of a child who wants to tell a story, not of 
an artist who grasps the whole. It is apparent in the 
soliloquies of II. 1, in the end of I. 3, and especially at 
the beginning of the same scene, in the interview be- 
tween Marcus and Appius. Appius is melancholy, 
declares himself in love. Marcus asks with whom, offer- 
ing to act pander. Appius tells him, Virginia. 

Marcus. Virginia's ! 

Appius. Hers. 

Marcus. I have already found 

An easy path which you may safely tread. 

Yet no man trace you. 

He goes on to explain in detail his rather elaborate 
plan. 

It is difficult to imagine dramatic innocence of this 
kind coming from Webster, whose humour and bizarrerie 
are, if not always successful, always entirely conscious, 
and whose simplicity, as playwright, is rather archais- 
tic than childish. 



174 JOHN WEBSTER 

These are some of the immediate difficulties in be- 
lieving Appius and Virginia to be by Webster. The 
further difficulties of explaining the nature and date 
of the play, if it is by him, strengthen our incredulity. 
Horn Webster came to write such a play, his various 
critics and commentators have not tried to ex- 
plain; chiefly because they have not understood that 
there was any need of explanation. They have realised 
neither how astonishing a tour de force it is, for an 
author so completely to sink his personality, nor that 
Webster is the last man to be capable of such a feat. 
The dumb evidence of their inability to make this play 
fit in with or illuminate the rest of Webster's work, 
speaks for them. When Webster wrote it, is a ques- 
tion they have tried to answer, however dimly. Their 
answers have all been different, and all importantly un- 
convincing. In the first place, the whole style of the 
play, in plot, characterisation, and metre, suggests an 
early date, somewhere between 1595 and 1615 ; and 
joins it, loosely, with Julius Ccesar (1601.'^), Coriolanus 
(1608?) and Hey wood's The Rape of Lucrece (1604.?). 
This is especially to be remarked of the metre, which 
is rather formal, without being stiff. It has few 
"equivalences," that is to say, the lines have nearly 
always ten (or, if "feminine," eleven) syllables. The 
licences are regular. They mostly consist of a few 
limited cases in which elision occurs, always noticeably, 
and almost conventionally — the chief example is be- 
tween "to" and a verb beginning with a vowel.* I have 

* E. g. "To obey, my lord, and to know how to rule . . ." 



APPENDICES 175 

already noticed the metrical dovetailing of speeches. 
All these prosodic characteristics suit, some rather 
demand, a date between 1600 and 1610. So does the 
influence of Marlowe and Machiavellism, and the char- 
acter of the clown, Corbulo, who is staringly introduced 
into the original story. Finally, the general and spe- 
cific dissimilarity in style of Appius and Virginia and 
Webster's other plays forbids a middle date, and re- 
quires an early rather than a late one, if the play be 
his. Only a young hand could have disguised its indi- 
viduality so completely. 

The other evidence, however, points in precisely the 
opposite direction. When you try to suggest a possi- 
ble date you meet bewildering difficulties. One of the 
most certain things about Appius and Virginia is that 
it is strongly influenced by Shakespeare's Roman pla3'^s, 
and especially by Coriolanus} Coriolanus is dated by 
most critical opinion as 1608-9. So Appius and Vir- 
ginia must be at least as late as 1609. But that is 
definitely in Webster's middle, most individual, period. 
The White Devil appeared in 1611, and he was con- 
fessedly a long time in writing it. If the author of The 
White Devil wrote Appius and Virginia^ it cannot have 
been only a year or eighteen months before. Then 
again you cannot slip the Roman play amazingly be- 
tween The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi (c. 
1613). It would be far easier to say that Shakespeare 
wrote Titus Andronicus between As You Like It and 

* StoU, pp. 193-197, illustrates this fully enough. A single read- 
ing of the play will prove it. 



176 JOHN WEBSTER 

Twelfth Night. And you must leave a decent interval 
after The Duchess of Malfi. You feel inclined to drop 
it quietly in the vacant space between The Duchess of 
Malfi and The Demi's Law-Case. But the progression 
in style here is so clear and gradual that it is nearly 
as difficult to squeeze it in there as between the trage- 
dies. Besides, if you get as late as 1617 or 1618, you 
may as well listen to Dr. StolPs evidence — that it is 
not mentioned in Webster's dedication to The Devil's 
Law-Case (printed 1623), and that it shows such close 
debts to Shakespeare that Webster must have written 
if after reading the First Folio (1623). So, buffeted 
and confused, you take refuge in his spacious "1623- 
1639"; a date which is in direct opposition to all your 
first conclusions. And if you want to adorn the affair, 
now you have settled it, with the circumstance and 
charm of reality, you may attribute, with Dr. StoU, 
not only Webster's style and handling to his study of 
the First Folio, but his Marlowe characteristics to his 
recent study of The Massacre at Paris (1593) pre- 
paratory to writing his own play The Guise, his clown 
to his friendship with Heywood, his strange style to his 
imitativeness of the fashion of his time, and his writing 
this sort of play at all to his fancy for going back to 
the fashions of twenty or thirty years earlier! 



II 



Well then, what reasons are there for thinking that 
Webster did write Appius and Virginia? The reasons 



APPENDICES 177 

are two — the attribution in 1654, and repetitions or 
parallels between Webster's other plays and this. They 
require examination. 

A p pins and Virginia was printed and published in 
1654, as by John Webster. The same edition was put 
forth in 1659 with a new title-page "Printed for Hum- 
phrey Moseley" ; ^ and again in 1679, "Acted at the 
Duke's Theatre under the name of The Roman Virgin 
or Unjust Judge.^' It is possible that Moseley only 
took over the edition between 1654 and 1659. In that 
case the attribution has even less weight. But let 
us put it at its strongest and suppose (what is most 
probable) that Moseley was always the publisher. It 
is being realised more and more how little importance 
attributions of the second half of the seventeenth cen- 
tury have. The theatrical traditions had been broken. 
Publishers attributed by guess-work, or hearsay, or to 
sell the book. In 1661, Kirkman published The Thra- 
cian Wonder as by Webster and Rowley. "No one," 
says Professor Vaughan, "except the editor, has ever 
supposed that Webster can have had a hand in it." 
Yet it is as Websterian as Appius and Virginia, The 
truth is, critics have at the back of their minds an 
idea that good poets write good poetry, and bad poets 
write bad poetry. Since this is as far as they can get, 
they are ready to give any good poem or play to any 

* For Moseley and his activities, v. Dictionary of National Biog- 
raphy; Plomer, Dictionary of Booksellers and Printers, 1641-1667; 
Masson, Life of Milton, iii. 448-457, vi. 352; Parrott, Tragedies 
of Chapman, p. 683; Malone, Variorum Shakespeare, iii. 229. 



178 JOHN WEBSTER 

good poet, and to refuse any bad one. Appius and 
Virginia being a fairly good play, there is no reason 
in the world why it should not be the work of Webster, 
who was a good writer. The Thracian Wonder, a bad 
play, could not possibly be from that hand. . . . The 
truth is very different. In actuality, a good poet or 
playwright tends to write good and bad things in his 
own style. An examination of the works of poets we 
can be sure about — Keats, or Shelley, or Swinburne — 
shows this. The author of the sonnet On first looking 
into Chapman^s Homer and the Ode to a Nighti/ngale 
also wrote the sonnets To my Brother George and to 
G.A.W. If the work of a century ago were largely 
anonymous or doubtful, and if the principles of Eliza- 
bethan criticism were applied, he might be given Alastor 
or The Vision of Judgement; he would certainly be 
robbed of the sonnets to George Keats and Georgiana 
Wylie. 

Humphrey Moseley was, as a matter of fact, one 
of the more trustworthy publishers of the time. Ma- 
lone and Professor Parrott are too hard on him. But 
he had the faults and ignorance of his period. Among 
other attributions he gives The Merry Devil of Edmon- 
ton to Shakespeare, The Parliament of Love (Massin- 
ger) to Rowley, The Faithful Friends to Beaumont and 
Fletcher, Alphonsus, Emperor of Germany to Chap- 
man, The Widow (Middleton) to Jonson, Fletcher, 
and Middleton, Henry I and Henry II (Davenport, 
probably) to Shakespeare and Davenport, and The 



APPENDICES 179 

History of King Stephen, Duke Humphrey, and Iphis 
and lantha to Shakespeare. 

Webster's works have, in one way and another, been 
pietty thoroughly scrutinised for parallels. Resem- 
blances in phrasing and thought between The White 
DevUy The Duchess of Malfi, The DeviVs Law-Case, and 
A Monumental Column are very numerous. A Cure 
for a Cuckold and Appius and Virginia are far less 
closely joined. In A Cure for a Cuckold there are cer- 
tain minor echoes of phrase that have some weight. 
I give a list of the only connections of Appius and Vir- 
ginia with the other plays that have been discovered 
previously, or that I have found.^ 

(a) Appius and Virginia, 149: 

I have seen children oft eat sweetmeats thus. 
As fearful to devour them: 

Duchess of Malfi, 65 : 

I have seen children oft eat sweetmeats thus. 
As fearful to devour them too soon. 

(6) A. and V., 151: 

One whose mind 
Appears more like a ceremonious chapel 
Full of sweet music, than a thronging presence. 

Duchess of Malfi, 79 : 

His breast was filled with all perfection, 
And yet it seemed a private whispering-room 
It made so little noise of 't. 

*The references are all by the pages of Dyce's one-volume edi- 
tion. 



180 JOHN WEBSTER 

Monumental Column, 11. 78, 79 : 

Who had his breast instated with the choice 
Of virtues^ though they made no ambitious noise. 

(c) A, and v., 163: 

Virginia. But she hath a matchless eye, Sir. 
CoRBULO. True, her eyes are no right matches. 

White Demi, 31 : 

Brachiano. Are not those matchless eyes mine? 
ViTTORiA. I had rather 

They were not matches.^ 

{d) A,andV.,\m: 

I only give you my opinion, 
I ask no fee for 't. 

Westward Ho! 242: 

Take my counsel: I'll ask no fee for 't. 

White Devil, 7: 

This is my counsel and I'll ask no fee for *t. 

{e) A, and v., 168: 

As aconitum, a strong poison, brings 

A present cure against all serpents' stings. 

White Devil, 26 : 

Physicians, that cure poisons, still do work 
With counter-poisons. 

^Quarto reading. Dyce reads "matchless": obviously wrongly. 



APPENDICES 181 

(/) A. and v., Ill: 

I vow this is a practised dialogue: 
Comes it not rarely ojflP? 

Duchess of Malfl, 63 : 

I think this speech between you both was studied, 
It came so roundly off. 

(g) A. and F., 172: 

For we wot 

The Office of a Justice is perverted quite 
When one thief hangs another.^ 

Duchess of Malfi, 90 : 

The office of justice is perverted quite 
When one thief hangs another. 

(h) A. and F., 180: 

Death is terrible 
Unto a conscience that's oppressed with guilt ! 

Duchess of Malfi, 99 : 

How tedious is a guilty conscience! 

(i) A, and F., 173: 

I have sung 
With an unskilful, yet a willing voice, 
To bring my girl asleep. 

»So Quarto. Dyce thinks this a mistake for "The office of jus- 
tice. ..." as in The Duchess of Malfi quotation. He is probably 
right. 



182 JOHN WEBSTER 

White Devil, 45 : 

I'll tie a garland here about his head; 
*Twill keep my boy from lightning. 

Besides these, there are various words: "dunghill" 
(A. and F., 171, 166, White Devil, 25), "mist" (of ig- 
norance) (A. and V., 167, 170, White Devil, 50^) are 
favourite and typical words of Webster. Note also 
"pursenet" in the sense of "wile" (A. and V., 170, 
DeviVs Law-Case, 130) and "not-being" {A. and F., 
180, Duchess of Malfi, 90). 

Of the resemblances, (c) is a common joke, (e) a. 
common idea (the Ben Jonson, Sejanus, quotation 
which Dyce gives in a note is much nearer than the 
passage from the White Devil to the A. and V. quo- 
tation), and (d) sounds like a catch-phrase. In (h) 
the two examples occur near the end of their plays, 
and slightly recall each other in atmosphere. In (i) 
the same effect of tenderness is got by the word "my." 

It seems to me that (6), a suggestion of Mr. Craw- 
ford's, holds good only between The Duchess of Malfl 
and A Monumental Column. 

These six examples are such that they would be 
important if they were ten or fifteen times as numer- 
ous ; being so few they are of no account. And I do 
not think many more could be found. 

The rest, (a), (/) and (g), are another matter. It 
is to be noted that (a) and (g) are exactly the sort 

* Especially the similarity between "in a mist," A. cmd V., 167, 
and "in a mist," White Devil, 50. 



APPENDICES 183 

of images and proverbial sayings (note the expression 
"we wot") that Webster and others collected. If Web- 
ster wrote Appius and Virginia, we can only say that 
he must have used the same note-book that he wrote 
The Duchess of Malfl with. If not, either the author 
of Appius and Virginia compiled his note-book out of 
The Duchess of Malfl among other books ; or else they 
used common sources. (/) is an even more significant 
parallel. For the circumstances are similar. In each 
drama two "villains" play into each other's hands in 
a dialogue which the "hero" discerns, suddenly, or 
guesses, to have been rehearsed. It is not an obvious 
thought. That it should be expressed at all is note- 
worthy ; that it should be expressed with such similarity 
of phrase and (which is important) metrical setting, 
is a valuable proof of identity of authorship. 

The words have little weight. The use of "mist" is 
striking; but "dunghill," though it irresistibly recalls 
Webster's manner, was not monopolised by him; and 
"not-being" (the repetition of which Dr. StoU seems 
to think remarkable) is not rare enough or typical 
enough to be of any significance. 

There the proofs of Webster's authorship end. The 
attribution of a late publisher, which is evidence of a 
notoriously untrustworthy character, and three or 
four passages of repetition or resemblance — that is all. 
The conclusion, for any impartial mind, is that there 
is very little evidence of the play being Webster's, 
rather more for his having had a finger in it, but 



184 JOHN WEBSTER 

much stronger evidence still that he had practically 
nothing to do with it. 



Ill 



If that is all there is to be said, we are left with an 
impression of general confusion, and a strongish feel- 
ing that anyhow Webster is responsible for very little 
of the play. 

But the question would be cleared, if anyone dis- 
covered a more promising candidate. This I believe 
I have done. I think I can show that Appius and 
Virginia is largely, or entirely, the work of Thomas 
Heywood. I shall give the direct proofs first: then 
the more indirect ones, by showing how his authorship 
fits in with the various facts that have made such havoc 
of Webster's claims. 

I have mentioned the queer distinctive vocabulary, 
especially of Latin words, used in Appius and Vir- 
ginia. The fact that Heywood uses a very similar 
vocabulary, especially in all his more classical works, 
would of itself be of little weight. But an individual 
examination of all the very unusual words and phrases 
in this play, together with a hurried scrutiny of Hey- 
wood's dramas, provides very startling results. I give 
a list. More minute search, no doubt, might largely 
increase it. It serves its purpose. I begin with the 
more striking words.^ 

* The references to Heywood's plays are to the pages of the six- 
volume Pearson edition, 1874. 



APPENDICES 185 

A, and v., 179: 

Redeem a base life with a noble death. 
And through your lust-burnt veins confine youi 
breath. 

"Confine," in this sense of "banish," was very rare. 
The N.E.D. gives one more or less contemporary ex- 
ample from Holinshed, and one, the only one, from 
Shakespeare. Dyce, in a footnote, gives five passages ; 
he comments, "it is somewhat remarkable that they are 
all from Heywood." I can add two. It was a very 
special word of Heywood's. 

Pleasant Dialogues ^ ii. p. 115: 

The soul confine. 
The body's dead, nor canst thou call it thine 

Royal King and Loyal Subject^ 82: 

Which as your gift I'll keep, till Heaven and Nature 
Confine it hence. 

It is to be noticed that the context in these two ex- 
amples is similar. 

Other examples are in The Golden Age, 23, Th€ Rape 
of Lucrece, 242, A Challenge for Beauty, 10, The 
Brazen Age, 199, TwaiKehv, iv, 207. 

A, and F., 174: 

If the general's heart be so ohdure. 

"Obdure" is a very rare word. It does not occur in 
Shakespeare. In the Elizabethan age it seems to have 



186 JOHN WEBSTER 

been used only by one or two religious writers and 
Heywood. Heywood is always using it. This word 
alone might almost be accepted as a proof that the 
passage it occurs in was by him. 

"Obdure" as adjective occurs in Lucrece, 219, S24, 
Golden Age, 5Q, 60, Fortwne hy Land and Sea, 375, 
Pleasant Dialogiies, 114: as verb, English Tran}eller, 
90, TvvaiKetov, i. 55, Brit, Troy, vi. 11. "Obdureness" 
comes in VwaLKttovj i, 55. 

A.afndV„W%:''Palpedr 

There are only three known instances of this extraor- 
dinary word ; this one, and two from Heywood's ac- 
knowledged works: Brit. Troy, xv. xlii. and Brazen 
Age, 206. 

I add a short list of instances that are less per- 
suasive individually, but have enormous weight collec- 
tively. 

A, and F., 152: 

Why should my lord droop, or deject his eye? 

Rare in this literal sense: not in Shakespeare. Hey- 
wood. // you know not me, 206: 

It becomes not 
You, being a Princess, to deject your knee. 

Cf. also Lucrece, 173, "dejected," 174, "dejection." 



APPENDICES 187 

A. and F., 153, prostrate, in a very uncommon meta- 
phorical usage: 

Your daughter . . . most humbly 
Prostrates her filial duty. 

This is paralleled twice in Heywood's The Rape of 
Lucrece, and once in another play: 

Rape of Lucrece, 173 : 

This hand . . . 

Lays his victorious sword at Tarquin's feet. 

And prostrates with that sword allegiance. 

Pp. 211, 212: 

The richest entertainment lives with us (i.e. that 

lives with us) 
According to the hour, and the provision 
Of a poor wife in the absence of her husband, 
We prostrate to you. 

Royal Kmg and Loyal Subject, 42 : 

To you . . . my liege, 
A virgin's love I prostrate, 

A, and v., 153: 

An infinite 
Of fair Rome's sons. 

"Infinite" is sometimes, though rarely, used by itself, 
more or less as a number. But used merely as a sub- 
stantive, as here, it is very unusual. It is found in 



188 JOHN WEBSTER 

Heywood's Rape of Lucrece, 234, Golden Age, 36 ; cf. 
also Rape of Lucrece, 243 : 

Before thee infinite gaze on thy face. 

A. amd V., 153: 

The iron wall 
That rings this pomp in from invasive steel. 

A rare word. Once in Shakespeare. The phrase is 
repeated in Heywood's Golden Age, 40: 

The big Titanoys 
Plow up thy land with their invasive steel. 

A. and v., 153: 

Let Janus' temple be devolved {i.e. overturned). 

A very rare word in this sense. The N.E.D. gives only 
two other examples, one of 1470, one of 1658. Not in 
Shakespeare. Heywood, Lucrece, 244 : 

For they behind him will devolve the bridge. 

A. and v., 155: 

You mediate excuse for courtesies. 
(i.e. beg on somebody else's behalf.) 

Rare: not in Shakespeare. In Webster's The White 
Devil in the sense of "to take a moderate position!" 
Marlowe and one or two prose-writers have used it in 



APPENDICES 189 

the sense of the text. It is found in Heywood, English 

Traveller^ 84: 

Will you. . . . 
Not mediate my peace .^^ 

A. and V., 161: 

Upon my infallid evidence. 

Very rare: not in Shakespeare. N.E.D. gives only 
two other examples, of which one is Heywood, Hier- 
arch., V. 308: 

All these are infallid testimonies 

A.andV,, 174: 

Let him come thrill his partisan 
Against this breast. 

'^Thrill, i.e. hurl, — an unusual sense of the word," says 
Dyce. He adds two quotations, both from Heywood's 
Iron Age, e.g. p. 316 : 

All which their javelins thrild against thy breast. 

Note the correspondence of phrase. This use is not 
found in Shakespeare. 

A.andV., 174: 

Marshal yourselves, and entertain this novel 
Within a ring of steel. 



190 JOHN WEBSTER 

An uncommon substantive, not found in Shakespeare. 
Heywood, English Traveller, 27, Golden Age, 55, Iron 
Age, Second Part, 373, Brazen Age, 202. 

A, and V„ 1^78 : 

One reared on a popular suffrage 
Whose station's built on aves and applause. 

For this sense, "shouts of applause," the N.E.D, 
gives only two examples; one from Shakespeare {Meas- 
ure for Measure), the other from Heywood, Golden 
Age, 8. 

And all the people with loud suffrages 
Have shrilled their aves high above the clouds. 

Note the conjunction with "suffrage." The human 
brain works half mechanical along tiny associative 
paths ; and minute hints of this kind, as a backing to 
more tangible instances of the uses of very rare words, 
importantly help this sort of proof. Heywood also 
uses the word uniquely. Golden Age, 47. 

The people ave'd thee to heaven. 

A, and v., 1^9: 

This sight has stiffened all my operant powers. 

Dyce quotes Hamlet, iii. 2 : 

My operant powers their function leave to do. 

And it is quite probable that the author of Appius and 
Virginia is borrowing the phrase from Shakespeare, 



APPENDICES 191 

for the word is very uncommon. Hejwood, in The 
Royal King and the Loyal Subjecty probably written 
just about the same time as Hamlet, uses the word, in 
the same sense (p. 6), only writing "parts" instead of 
"powers." The sense of this passage is even nearer to 
the Hamlet line: they are obviously connected — - 
through Heywood, as usual, echoing rather than imi- 
tating Shakespeare. 

When I forget thee may my operant parts 
Each one forget their office. 

It seems to me probable that Heywood echoed Shake- 
speare immediately in The Royal King and the Loyal 
Subject, and soon after, rather less closely in Appius 
and Virginia, 

A. and F., 179: Strage, 

A rare Latinism: not in Shakespeare. Heywood uses 
it in Pleasant Dialogues, iii. and in The Hierarchies 
There are other general verbal resemblances. The 
kind of word Heywood invents and uses is the same in 
Appius and Virginia and through the six volumes of 
his collected "dramatic works." "Eternized," "mon- 
archizer," "applausive," "opposure" occur in the lat- 
ter; "imposturous," "enthronized," "donative," in the 
former. Who could distinguish.'^ In Appius and Vir- 

*The earlier and longer form of this appendix contains about a 
dozen further instances of verbal similarity, which were omitted 
in the later version as being rather less striking than those given 
here, and therefore unnecessary to the argument. Ed. 



192 JOHN WEBSTER 

gmia, 178, he invents (possibly adopts) the rare verb 
"to oratorize." In The English Traveller^ 68, he uses 
the form "to orator." Resemblances of phrase are as 
numerous, though not so striking. Heywood was too 
ordinary and too hurried a writer to have much eccen- 
tricity of phrase. He wrote in the common style of the 
time, only slightly garnished by a few queer pet words 
and a certain Latinism of vocabulary. He does not 
repeat lines and metaphors as many writers do; only, 
occasionally, phrases and collocations of words, but 
these of such a kind as all his contemporaries repeated 
also. The result is that it is difficult to find parallels 
of this nature between any of his works. What there 
are between Appius and Virginia and the rest, there- 
fore, have more weight than they would have in the 
case of some other dramatists. 

There is a rather puzzling expression just at the 
end of Appius and Virginia (p. 180) : 

Appius died like a Roman gentleman. 
And a man both ways knowing. 

It is, metrically and in a sense, very like a sentence at 
the end of The English Traveller (p. 94) : 

Dalavill 
Hath played the villain, but for Geraldine, 
He hath been each way noble. 

Cf . also Fortune hy Land and Sea, 386 : 

Come ! I am both ways armed against thy steel. 



APPENDICES 193 

One of the few points which the author of Appms 
and Virginia introduced into the stories of Dionysius 
and Livy, is the plot to coerce Virginia by refusing 
the army's pay and forcing Virginius to sell his goods 
to pay them. In the first act of A Maidenhood Well 
Lost (espec. iii fF.) Strozza lays much the same plot 
against "the General" and his daughter, and what en- 
sues, the army starving and the general paying the 
soldiers himself, is exactly the same. This shows, at 
least, that the idea was in Heywood's mind when he 
was writing A Maidenhood Well Lost. What is more 
significant is that another idea in the camp-scenes in 
Appius and Virginia (also original) was in his mind 
when he was writing The Rape of Lucrece, On page 
205 the sentry makes the entirely unnecessary remark 
about his occupation : 

Thus must poor soldiers do; 
While their commanders are with dainties fed^ 
And sleep on down, the earth must be our bed. 

This is the motif of the whole mutiny-scene in Appius 
and Virginia (p. 156). See especially the lines: 

I wake in the wet trench. 
Loaded with more cold iron than a gaol 
Would give a murderer, while the general 
Sleeps in a field-bed, and to mock our hunger 
Feeds us with scent of the most curious fare 
That makes his tables crack. 

It is obvious that Heywood's mind ran easily into 
the same trains of thought. Suggest "Camp" to him, 



194 JOHN WEBSTER 

and he readily pictures, in his pleasant light water- 
colours, the starving, cold soldiers sub divo and the 
general feeding luxuriously and enjoying a bed. In- 
deed, the parallels of idea with Lucrece are numerous, 
as one would expect. Heywood felt that a great man 
of that time was attended by a "secretary." Porsenna, 
King of the Tuscans, in his tent (Lucrece, 245) wants 
lights. He calls "Our Secretary !" The secretary ap- 
pears with "My lord?" In Appius and Virginia (159, 
160) when Appius is bearded by Icilius, he calls out 
for help, "Our Secretary !" and summons him again at 
the end of the interview, "Our Secretary! . , . We 
have use for him." Marcus appears; 

My honourable lord? , . .^ 

There are other such small points — the bearing of 
the dead, bleeding bodies of Lucrece, and of Virginia, 
before the people, and their sympathy and rage; the 
vagueness of locality in each play ; and so on. 

But there is a more remarkable resemblance. It is 
part of a general link with Heywood's works — the 
clown. Dr. Stoll has three pages (197-SOO) pointing 
out and illustrating the kinship of Corbulo in Appius 
and Virginia with Heywood's clowns, and especially the 
clown of The Rape of Lucrece} The Heywood clown, 
an early type, was a simple, good-hearted creature, who 
had little to do with the play, and poured out puns and 
somewhat Euphuistic jokes to amuse the crowd. There 

^See also Eckhardt, Die histige Person im alteren englischen 
Drama, p. 433, etc. 



APPENDICES 195 

was a painstaking, verbal tumbling they all indulged in. 
You can pick at random. "If they suddenly do not 
strike up," says Slime of the lingering musicians,^ "I 
shall presently strike them ^ down." It is the voice of 
Corbulo. The clown in The Golden Age is precisely the 
same. So is the one in Lucrece, and as the plays are 
more alike, the similarity of his position is the more 
easily seen. It is, in the first place, a very remarkable 
coincidence that he should be there at all. Appius and 
Virginia and The Rape of Lucrece are the only Roman 
plays of the adult Elizabethan drama to introduce such 
a character. It was exactly like Heywood to modify 
the tradition and genus in this way. It would not 
have been at all like Webster. Dr. Stoll emphasises 
and details this similarity so admirably, and as he 
has no idea that Appius and Virginia is not by Web- 
ster, his testimony is so valuable in its impartiality, 
that I cannot do better than quote his description. 

In both cases the clown is servant to the heroine, and he 
appears in like situations. He is sent by his mistress on 
errands, is taken to task by her for ogling at her maid (and 
that in the latter's presence), and is left to chatter with 
other servants alone. He jokes about his mistress's mis- 
fortune, about the sinners in the suburbs, and, being a Ro- 
man, out of the Latin grammar. And the comic side of both 
is the same. It lies all in the speeches — the clown plays no 
pranks and suffers no mishaps — and it has an episodic, 
random, and anachronistic character. It is all jest and rep- 
artee, puns, quibbles, and catches, and those neither clever 
nor new; and the drift of it all, whenever it gets beyond 

^A Woman killed with Kindness, 97. 
»01d Text "thee!" 



196 JOHN WEBSTER 

words, is satire on London life and manners. It is good- 
humoured, moreover, naive and dirty. 

The episode between the maid, or nurse, and the 
clown, an entirely irrelevant excrescence, is especially 
noteworthy. There is even a certain similarity in 
phrasing and thought, of a kind that suggests the same 
mind working at different times, rather than imitation. 
Virginia and Lucrece both address the clown as "Sir," 
impatiently. Virginia begins: 

You are grown wondrous amorous of late; 
Why do you look back so often? 
Lucrece. Sirrah, I ha' seen you oft familiar 

With this my maid and waiting-gentlewoman. 
As casting amorous glances, wanton looks, 
And privy becks, savouring incontinence. 

Dr. Stoll, supposing Appius and Virginia Webster's, 
can of course only suggest that Webster, imitating 
Shakespeare in the general conception of his play, 
turned suddenly, picked out one favourite character 
of Heywood's, and, with Heywood's authority for the 
anachronism, introduced an extraordinarily good imi- 
tation of it into his own work. He is like a ventrilo- 
quist who has at least two lay-figures, each talking 
with a different voice from the other's, and from their 
master's. "Eclecticism" is a mild word for such a 
method. 

IV 

Anyone who believes in Webster's authorship of 
the play, has now got to explain away not only the 



APPENDICES 197 

date difficulty, not only the general aesthetic absurdity, 
not only the borrowing of a pet character of Hey- 
wood's, but also the sudden entire adoption of Hey- 
wood's individual, distinguishing vocabulary. Twenty 
years' friendship, you are to suppose, never affected 
Webster's vocabulary in this direction in the slightest 
degree. Then, in a transport of "senile" affection, he 
hurled aside his own personality, and became mere 
Tom. 

In the next place, consider how the theory of Hey- 
wood's authorship suits the facts of the play. If 
Heywood wrote Appius and Virginia, there is no diffi- 
culty about words or handling. He wrote the play 
most like it of all the plays in the world. There is 
no difficulty about style. It is exactly like Heywood 
when he is writing solemnly, as in parts of Lucrece, 
parts of the various "Ages," and the beginning and 
end of The Royal King and the Loyal Subject. Only 
it is rather more mature, it has a little more freedom 
and rhetoric, than the early style of Lucrece and some 
of the "Ages." This suits the other indications of 
date. For, again, there is no difficulty about the date. 
The difference between Lucrece and Appius and Vir- 
ginia is mostly due to the fact that Coriolanus (c. 
1608) must have intervened. Any date after 1608 
would do ; immediately after is the most likely, because 
the resemblances of style and vocabulary are, on the 
whole, to the rather earlier works. 

I imagine that the main part of Appius and Vir- 
ginia, as we have it, was written then. It may, and 



198 JOHN WEBSTER 

indeed must, have been cut about and altered, by Hey- 
wood or others, before it found a last home with "Bees- 
ton's boys" in 1639, or a final resting-place with Mose- 
ley in 1654. 

The metrical characteristics noticed in Appiws and 
Virginia are Heywood's. Heywood's blank verse, says 
Dr. Schipper,-^ is "sehr gewandt und harmonisch ge- 
baut." This applies perfectly to our play. He also 
calls attention, of course, to the number of rhyming 
couplets, ending off even short speeches. It is this 
characteristic in Appius and Virginia that slightly puz- 
zles Dr. Stoll and suddenly upsets his metrical tables 
(p. 190). The only detailed examination of Hey- 
wood's prosody that I know is in Dr. Franz Albert's 
"Uber Thomas Heywood's Life and Death of Hector 
of TroyJ^ ^ It is concerned mainly with certain sides 
of Heywood's work, mostly undramatic, and it is not 
very perspicacious, having most of the faults of Ger- 
mans trying to understand English metre. But it 
enumerates some of the more tangible characteristics, 
and lays great stress on that trick of conscious and 
rather conventionalised elision, especially between "to" 
and a verb with an initial vowel, that I had already in- 
dependently noticed in Appius and Virginia, and have 
remarked on earlier in this appendix. 

The various characteristics of the play that are 
no bar to Webster's authorship fit in equally well or 
better with Heywood's. This is the case with the 

^Englische Metrik, 1881, vol. ii. p. 335. 
* Especially pp. 22, 172. 



APPENDICES 199 

numerous slight imitations of phrases of Shakespeare, 
which are rather more a mark of Hejwood than of 
Webster.^ 

The sources of Appius and Virginia ^ are, ultimately, 
Livj and Dionjsius of Halicarnassus. Dr. Lauschke 
believes he used both of these, and also Painter, who 
paraphrased Livj, and Giovanni Fiorentino, the Ital- 
ian translator of Dionysius. As Dr. Stoll points out, 
there is no evidence for Giovanni Fiorentino, and very 
little for Livy in the original, as against Painter.^ 
They do not seem, however, to have considered the pos- 
sibility of Philemon Holland's well-known translation 
of Livy (1600). In the passage where the question of 
Virginia's custody till the trial is being discussed, Hol- 
land introduces the technical legal word "forthcom- 
ing." Appius and Virginia makes good use of the word 
in the corresponding passage (p. 167). Painter does 
not use it, and the Latin does not necessarily suggest 
it. The author of Appius and Virginia may have 
thought of it for himself, in reading the original. But 
it decidedly points to Holland being used ; and there- 
fore does away with the necessity of either Painter or 

^ See Cambridge History of English Literature, vol. vi. p. 106. 

' See Lauschke, "John Webster's Tragodie Appius and Virginia" 
and Stoll, pp. 160-162. 

'There are two points: (a) Li\y has "sordidatus" ; A. and V. 
"disguised in dust and sweat"; Painter nothing. This is very 
little, and becomes nothing when you realise — Dr. Stoll does not 
point it out, though Lauschke does — that "sordidatus" and "dis- 
guised . . ." come in entirely different parts of the story. (6) 
Minutius as the name of the general at Algidum occurs in Livy, 
not in Painter or Dionysius. This has a little weight. 



200 JOHN WEBSTER 

Livy. It is certain that Dionysius was used,^ in the 
original or a Latin translation (there was probably 
no English translation at this time). The sources, 
then, favour Heywood if anything. Of Webster's 
classical knowledge we can only say that he knew other 
people's Latin quotations. Thomas Heywood, Fellow 
of Peterhouse, translator of Sallust, Ovid, and Lucian, 
author of the learned Hierarchie, Apology for Actors y 
VvvaiKeiov, etc., was a lover of learning and a reader 
of Latin and Greek all his life. 



It remains to see what explanation, on the assump- 
tion that Heywood is mainly or entirely the author of 
Appius and Virginia, can be given of the exiguous 
pieces of evidence that point towards Webster. There 
is first Moseley's attribution. I have said how little 
weight the attribution of a late publisher carries. In 
this case it is impossible to do much more than theorise 
about what can have happened. If Heywood's name 
was on the play when Moseley got it, it is unlikely he 
would have changed it for Webster's, not only because 
he seems to have been fairly honest, but also because 
there was not sufficient inducement. Of the two, how- 
ever, Webster was the more famous and attractive after 
the Civil War. Winstanley (1686) (who — it is an odd 
accident — ^mentions all Webster's plays except Appius 
^ V. Stoll, p. 162, for conclusive proofs. 



APPENDICES 201 

and Virginia) makes little of either of them. Phillips 
(1674) says Webster was the author of "several not 
wholly to be rejected plays"; on the identity of which, 
however, he was terribly shaky. Hey wood he dismisses 
even more cursorily as the writer of "many but vulgar 
comedies." Langbaine, who always takes a rather high 
tone, describes Webster as "an author that lived in 
the reign of King James the First, and was in those 
days accounted an excellent poet." But he goes on to 
confess that The Duchess of Malfi, The White Devil, 
and Appius and Virginia, "have, even in our own age, 
gained applause." It was true. The White Devil was 
being acted at the Theatre Royal in 1671, and a quarto 
of it was printed in the following year. The Duchess 
of Malfl was acted in 1664 at Lincoln's Inn Fields, and 
in 1667 at the Duke's Theatre. It was reprinted in 
the same year. Downes (RosciMs Anglicanus) de- 
scribes it as "one of the best stock-tragedies." Appius 
and Virgvnia, as Webster's, with Betterton's alterations, 
was acted at the Duke's Theatre in 1670. Mrs. Better- 
ton was Virginia. Genest quotes from Downes that 
it ran for eight days, and was very frequently acted 
afterwards. All this shows that Webster's name was 
fairly well known in this period. There is no trace of 
any known play of Heywood's being revived. 

It is easy enough to imagine a play of his coming 
without a name, or with a wrong name, into the hands 
of a publisher of 1654. There were two hundred and 
twenty plays "in which I have had either an entire 



202 JOHN WEBSTER 

hand or at least a main finger." * On any that came 
to the press in his lifetime, he seems to have kept an 
eye. For the others, when they had passed out of his 
control, he seems not to have cared. "Many of them, 
by shifting and change of companies have been negli- 
gently lost; others of them are still retained in the 
hands of some actors who think it against their pecu- 
liar profit to have them come in print." ^ Appiws and 
Virginia may have belonged to either, more probably 
to the latter class. And it is very easy to trace a pos- 
sible and probable history of this play.^ We first hear 
of it in 1639, in the possession of Christopher Beeston's 
company of boys, who occupied the Cockpit Theatre 
from 1637 onwards. Now Christopher Beeston and 
Thomas Hey wood were members of Queen Anne's com- 
pany from its foundation in 1603. In 1617 the Cock- 
pit opened, and Queen Anne's company went there till 
1619. From 1619 to 1625 the lady Ehzabeth's com- 
pany held the Cockpit, and probably, though not cer- 
tainly, Heywood and Beeston were of them. From 
1625 to 1637 they were followed by Queen Henrietta's 
company, managed by Beeston. And then came Bee- 
ston's company of boys, who possessed the play in 
1639. Among all the various strands of continuity in 
the Elizabethan theatres and companies, this is a very 
definite one, forming about Heywood and Beeston, in 
connection first with Queen Anne's company, and then, 

^The English Traveller: To the Reader. 'Ibid. 

•See Murray, English Dramatic Companies, vol. i. pp. 265-270, 
and elsewhere. 



APPENDICES 203 

locally, with the Cockpit. And with Heywood, Bee- 
ston, and, I believe, Appius and Virginia, on this long 
journey, goes significantly The Rape of Lucrece. 

It is also to be noticed that it was Queen Anne's 
company that acted two of Webster's three original 
plays, The White Demi (1611) and The DeviVs Law- 
Case (1620). He seems to have gone off to the King's 
Men between these, with The Duchess of Malfl (1612- 
1613). But we may suppose that he had most to do 
with Queen Anne's company. 

There remain the similarities and repetitions of 
phrase in Appius and Virginia and Webster's plays. 
As I have said, only three of these are of any im- 
portance, two exact verbal repetitions and one strik- 
ing similarity of phrase and idea; all connecting with 
The DucJiess of Malfl} If Heywood wrote the main 
part or all of Appius and Virginia, there are six pos- 
sible explanations of these passages. They are an 
accident; or Heywood imitated Webster; or Webster 
imitated Heywood; or the play was touched up by 
some Queen's company actor or author who knew The 
Duchess of Malfl; or Webster himself touched it up; 
or Webster and Heywood wrote Appius and Virginia 
together, Heywood taking the chief part. 

The first is improbable, though far less improbable 
than it seems. For both (a) and (g) are sententious 
sayings such as the Elizabethans delighted to note 
down and repeat. Webster is full of these. And the 
identical repetition of one of them by him and Marston 

* (a), (f), and (g) in my list (pp. 179-182). 



204 JOHN WEBSTER 

supported great theories of his imitation of Marston 
till Mr. Crawford discovered it in Montaigne,-^ the 
common source to which they had independently gone. 
Still, the coincidence of the two apophthegms is rather 
much to account for in this way. It is possible, but 
that is all. And there is the further difficulty against 
it that Heywood was not wont to write in this note- 
book manner. He worked too quickly. 

This also counts against what might otherwise seem 
an easier theory, that (f ) is either an accident or the 
imitation of reminiscence, but that these two (a) and 
(g) are the result of Heywood directly copying Web- 
ster — noting down and using two of his phrases. The 
possibility of this is also lessened by the probability 
on other grounds that Appius and Virginia is earlier 
than The Duchess of Malfi. Webster may have imi^ 
tated Heywood. He was a great friend of his at this 
time.^ And if Appius and Virginia was, as is prob- 
able, written early, it must have appeared in the same 
theatre and about the same time as The White Devil.^ 
Also it was Webster's habit to take down from other 
authors and afterwards use sentences and similes of an 
apophthegmatic or striking nature. We know that 
he treated Donne, Montaigne, Jonson, Sidney, and 
perhaps Marston and Dekker in this way. Why not 

t 

* Crawford, Collectanea, Series ii. p. 35. 

' He wrote some lines "To his beloved friend Master Thomas 
Heywood," prefixed to Heywood's A'pology for Actors, 1612. 

' It is an important indication of the date of Appius and Vir- 
ginia that The White Devil (1611) does not borrow from it, and 
The Duchess of Malfi (1612-13) does. 



APPENDICES 205 

Heywood, his friend and collaborator ? It is true Hey- 
wood does not lend himself often so easily to such use. 
That, and the fact that he has not been thoroughly 
searched for such a purpose, may explain why there 
are few other known parallels. This theory is the more 
probable because the lines of (a) and (g), and their 
ideas, seem more natural and in place in Appius and 
Virginia than they do in The Duchess of Malfi. And 
it is easier to imagine Webster finding {Appius and 
Virginia, 149), 



I have seen children oft eat sweetmeats thus. 
As fearful to devour them, 



and adding (Duchess of Malfi, Q^) the words "too 
soon" than Heywood doing the opposite. 

There remain the various possibilities of two hands 
having been at work, or the same hand at two periods. 
These are favoured by the a priori probability of a 
play that had at least thirty years of acting life being 
altered in the period, and also by certain indications 
that all is not right with the play as it stands. These 
I shall shortly set out. 

In the beginning of Act I. there is a queer and soli- 
tary passage of prose which looks like an abbreviation 
for acting purposes. Dyce suspects it ; and it is to be 
noted that the speech following the prose contains one 
of the two "repetitions" from The Duchess of Malfi. 

In II. 3 (p. 160) there are difficulties which seem 
to have passed unnoticed. Icilius comes to plead with 



206 JOHN WEBSTER 

Appius for the camp, and so for Virginius. Appius 
counters with a proposal that Icihus should give up 
Virginia, and marry into his own family. Icilius flies 
out with the charge that Appius has been lustfully 
tempting Virginia with presents and letters. Appius 
is prevented by force and threats from either calling 
for help or replying. At length the storm subsides. 
Appius replies, pretending he knows nothing of it, 
playing indulgent eld. Icilius crumbles completely. 

I. I crave your pardon. 

A. Granted ere craved_, my good Icilius. 

I. Morrow. 

A. It is no more indeed. Morrow, Icilius, 

If any of our servants wait without. 

Command them in. 

I do not think any good sense can be made out of that 
"It is no more indeed." It looks, at first sight, like a 
pun on "morrow." But that does not help. Indeed the 
whole collapse of Icilius is oddly curt and sudden. It 
seems to me probable that a cut has been made here, 
or some other operation of hasty revision. 

And in the next scene. III. 1 (pp. 161-2) Icilius 
reports the interview to his friends and Virginia. He 
went, he says, to Appius, took him by the throat, 
forced him to hear, taxed him with his lust and his 
behaviour, "with such known circumstance" that Ap- 
pius could try to excuse it, but could not deny it. 
They parted "friends in outward show" ; Appius swore 
"quite to abjure her love"; but yet had continued his 
messages. 



APPENDICES 207 

Now this is quite a different story from the truth. 
In a play of this kind, simple in characterisation and 
full of childishness in construction and episode, we 
cannot suppose the author was attempting the subtle 
irony Ibsen practised in The Wild Duck, where you 
see the truth in one scene and Hialmar Ekdal's family 
version of it in the next. Nor would such a sudden 
spasm of Euripidean double-dealing help either the 
character of Icilius or the play. Besides, there are 
other indications of confusion. For when (III. 2, p. 
164) Virginia is suddenly arrested, she cries out: 

O my Icilius, your incredulity 
Hath quite undone me ! 

which seems to refer to the first, true version of the 

story, and to mean that Icilius' not beheving her but 

accepting Appius' defence had ruined her. These 

seem to me to be plain signs that the scenes as they 

stand have been written, to some extent at least, by two 

people, or by the same person at different times. 

Another discrepancy affecting the same point, the 

interview and the report of it, is mentioned by Dyce 

in his note on II. 3 (p. 158). The scene would seem 

to be an outer apartment in the house of Appius. 

But presently, when Appius is left alone with Icilius, 

a change of scene is supposed: for he says to Claudius 

(p. 160): 

To send a ruffian hither, 
Even to my closet! 



208 JOHN WEBSTER 

And yet, in the first scene of the next act, Icilius 
speaks of the interview as having taken place in the 
lobby ! 

The only other suspicion of corruption in this play 
which I know of may as well be mentioned here. Mr. 
Pierce ^ believes that III. 4, the conversation between 
Corbulo and the serving-men, was interpolated to please 
the groundlings. His reasons are: (1) it is wholly in 
prose; (2) the doggerel rhyme; (3) it does not ad- 
vance the action; (4) the average number of three- 
syllable Latin words (his particular test) is very low. 
I do not feel convinced. The scene is extremely Hey- 
woodian. The Latin-word test is not so important as 
Mr. Pierce appears to think, especially when applied 
to a short, rather comic, prose-scene. And it affects 
Heywood far less than Webster. No doubt this scene 
was put in "to please the groundlings." But it was 
put in by the author. 

The conclusion, then, that the play as we have it 
has been revised and altered, helps any theory that 
Webster and Heywood each had a finger in it. It 
might, of course, have been changed by any member 
of the Queen's Servants' Company. But he would 
not be likely to have incorporated passages from The 
Duchess of Malfl, a play belonging to the King's Men. 
If it was Heywood himself that touched it up, in 1613 
or so, he might quite well have done this, being a friend 
of Webster's. But it is most easy to suppose Webster 
the reviser. Either this, or his collaboration, is ren- 
* The Collaboration of Webster and Dekker. 



APPENDICES 209 

dered rather probable by the presence through the 
play of ten or a dozen passages, averaging perhaps two 
lines, that seem to taste slightly of his style. Perhaps 
it is true that any play, examined closely, would yield 
the same. And certainly Heywood could have written 
them. But, at moments, there does seem to be the 
flavour, almost imperceptibly present. If reviser or 
collaborator, Webster obviously had recourse to the 
same note-books as he used for The Duchess of Malfi, 
which suggests that he would be working on it about 
1612 or soon after. And in either case, we should 
have a very good explanation of his name being con- 
nected with the play. If he revised, we must sup- 
pose that he shortened and made more dramatic the 
very beginning of the play, and heightened, or even 
rewrote, the trial scene (IV. 1). It is important to 
notice that in this rather long scene (1) there are no 
very characteristic words of Hey wood's, (2) there are 
more of the phrases, words and lines that are faintly 
reminiscent of Webster than anywhere else in the play,^ 
(3) two ^ of the three strong indications of a connec- 
tion with Webster occur. 

Give Webster the revision of these two scenes, and 
you have satisfied his utmost claims. To yield him 
more is mere charity. If he collaborated, it is impos- 
sible to divide the play up between the two. In certain 

^ "Dunghill," "mist," "pursenet," "to bring my girl asleep," "and 
this short dance of life is full of changes," etc., etc. 
»/. e. (/) and (g). 



210 JOHN WEBSTER 

scenes (e.g. IV. S and V. 3) Hey wood's vocabulary 
comes out more clearly than in the rest. But one can 
only say that Webster's part is very small compared 
with Heywood's, as unimportant as it is in Northward 
Ho and Westward Ho, 

In sum: general, critical, and aesthetic impressions, 
more particular examination of various aspects, and 
the difficulty of fitting it in chronologically, make it 
impossible to believe that Appius and Virginia is by 
Webster, while the evidence in favour of his authorship 
is very slight. All these considerations, and also re- 
markable features of vocabulary and characterisation, 
make it highly probable that it is by Heywood. The 
slight similarities between The Duchess of Malfi and 
Appius and Virginia may be due to Webster borrowing 
in The Duchess of Malfi from Heywood, or revising 
Appius and Virginia, or having, not for the first time, 
collaborated with Heywood, but very subordinately. 
In any case, Appius and Virginia must be counted 
among Heywood's plays; not the best of them, but 
among the better ones; a typical example of him in 
his finer moments, written rather more carefully than 
is usual with that happy man. 



Appendix E. — Miscellaneous 

NON-EXTANT PLAYS 

There are no difficulties about the dates of most of 
the non-extant plays. Ccesar's Fall, Two Shapes, and 
Christmas Comes but Once a Year are dated 1602 by 
the entries in Henslowe. Dr. Greg from the list of 
collaborators and the nearness in date of the payments 
thinks Ccesar^s Fall and Two Shapes must be the same 
play ; it may be so, but it is not convincing. Henslowe 
may very well have been employing the same people 
in the same month to write two plays. There is a 
doubt about the name of Two Shapes. That is Dr. 
Greg's reading. Collier read Two Harpes; which some 
construe Two Harpies. 

A Late Murther of the Son upon the Mother by Ford 
and Webster is entered in Herbert's Office Book for 
September, 1624. Pamphlets of July, 1624, about 
such a murder case are on record. The play must 
have been written in that year. 

The Guise, which Webster mentions in his Dedica- 
tion to The DeviVs Law-Case, is of quite unknown date. 
An entry in Henslowe for 1601 giving Webster a play 
of that name turns out to be a forgery of Collier's. 
The original entry probably referred to Marlowe's 

211 



212 JOHN WEBSTER 

Massacre at Paris. Dr. Stoll, scenting Marlowe in 
Webster's latest plays, has spun a theory of Webster 
reading up Marlowe, especially the Massacre at Paris, 
in his old age. He deduces that we can date Guise 
about 1620. The whole theory rests on a quite wild 
assumption that an Elizabethan dramatist, wishing to 
write a play on a certain subject, began by reading 
up all previous plays on that subject, like a professor 
of English Literature. If Webster's own list of plays 
is in chronological order, Guise is later than 1614!. 
We can say no more. 

"the thracian wonder" 

The Thracian Wonder, like A Cure for a Cuckold, 
was first published in 1661 by Francis Kirkman as by 
Webster and Rowley. No one believes it to be by 
either. The reasons of this disbelief are entirely aes- 
thetic. It is dangerous, as I have said elsewhere, to 
take it for granted that a bad play cannot be by a 
good author. It is conceivable that Webster and Row- 
ley might have written or helped to write a play like 
this at the beginning of their careers. Each has been 
concerned in equally bad work. But if they did write 
it, it does not increase our knowledge of them; and if 
they did not write it, it does not matter who did. 
So the affair is not very important. A rather unsuc- 
cessful attempt has been made to explain Kirkman's 
attribution. Another Webster in 1617 wrote a story, 
which had no connection with this play, but which 



APPENDICES 213 

Kirkman may have thought had. It is not necessary. 
Kirkman was one of the wildest of the Restoration 
pubHshers. The fact that he was pubhshing one play 
as by Webster and Rowley might quite likely lead him 
to put their names on the title-page of its twin. Any- 
how he has no authority. We do not know who did or 
who did not write The Thracian Wonder. 



"monuments of honour" 



Monuments of Honour is a quite ordinary city 
triumph, there is nothing remarkable or important 
about it. It was published in 1624 as by "John Web- 
ster, merchant taylor." "John Webster" was a com- 
mon enough name, and there is no proof that this one 
is our author. The Latin tag on the title-page, which 
also ends the preface to The WhiteDevil, was in common 
use. There is only the probability that no other John 
Webster would have been distinguished enough in liter- 
ature to have been chosen to write this. The guilds 
generally liked to get hold of some fairly accomplished 
literary man for such a purpose. Neither the verse nor 
the invention of this pageant affirms the authorship of 
Webster. But there is also nothing to contradict it. 



Appendix C. — Sir Thomas Wyatt 

''the famous history of sir THOMAS WYATT" 

Date. 

The Famous History of Sir Thomas Wyatt. With 
the Coronation of Queen Mary and the Coming In of 
King Philip. Written by Thomas Dickers and John 
Webster, was printed in 1607.^ In October, 1602, 
Chettle, Dekker, Heywood, Smith, and Webster were 
paid, in all, £8 for Part I. of Lady Jane or The Over- 
throw of Rebels; and Dekker was paid, in earnest, 5s. 
for Part II. (Smith and Chettle may have received 
small amounts for this, also.) All this was on behalf 
of Worcester's Men, who passed under the patronage 
pf Queen Anne in 1603. As the 1607 Quarto of Sir 
Thomas Wyatt says it was played by the Queen's 
Majesty's Servants, and as the authors are the same, 
there is no reason to doubt that Dyce was right in 
supposing that Sir Thomas Wyatt consists of frag- 
ments of both parts of Lady Jane. Dr. Stoll thinks 
perhaps we have only Part I., as The Coronation of 
Queen Mary and The Coming In of King Philip are 
only promised and not given. Dr. Greg suggests that 
the cut version of Part I. ends and Part II. begins, 

* F. Greg. Henslowe's Diary, Pt. ii. pp. 232, 3. There was an- 
other edition in 1612. 

214 



APPENDICES 215 

with Mary's audience (p. 193, column 2; Scene 10). 
Professor Schelling makes the credible suggestion that 
the censor had cut out a great deal; especially, no 
doubt, the Coming In of King Philip. As it stands, 
the play is extraordinarily short. In any case, the 
date is 1602. It must have been played at "The Rose" ; 
and, as there are two editions, it was probably revived. 

Sources. 

The source of Sir Thomas Wyatt — that is, of the 
two parts of Lady Jane — is Holinshed ; and, as far as 
we know, nothing else.-^ 

Collaboration. 

Opinions have differed as to the respective amounts 
contributed by Dekker and Webster. Dr. Stoll, argu- 
ing from metre, sentiment, style, phrases, and the gen- 
eral nature of the play, can find Dekker everywhere, 
Webster nowhere. Dr. Greg gives Webster rather more 
than half, mostly the first half. Mr. Pierce ^ says that 
Webster wrote "most of Scenes 2, 5, 6, 10, 14, and 16, 
although some of these scenes were certainly retouched 
by Dekker, and all of them may have been." I shall 
discuss Mr. Pierce's method of assigning scenes more 
closely in the Appendix on Westward Ho and North- 
ward Ho. In the case of Sir Thomas Wyatt none of 
his metrical tests seems to me to have any validity. 

* V. Stoll, p. 45. 

' The Collaboration of Webster and Dekker. I use his division 
into scenes, which is the same as Fleay's. 



216 JOHN WEBSTER 

They depend, like Dr. StoU's, on the assumption that 
Webster's metrical characteristics were the same in 
1602 as in 1610 or 1620 — an assumption Mr. Pierce 
himself confesses to be absurd. It must be recognised 
that we have only three plays on which we can base 
our generalisations about Webster's metre, two slowly- 
written Italian tragedies of about 1610 or 1612 and 
a tragi-comedy of 1620. In Sir Thomas Wyatt Web- 
ster was writing a different kind of play, together with 
a lot of other people, probably in a great hurry; and 
it is likely he was immature. To take the statistics 
for rhyme in The Duchess of Malfl and the other plays 
and use them, as proving that Webster uses rhyme less 
than Dekker, to apportion the scenes in Sir Thomas 
Wyatt, is a glaring example of that statistical blind- 
ness and inert stupidity that has continually spoilt the 
use of the very valuable metrical tables that have been 
prepared for Elizabethan Drama. The evidence that 
metre gives in Sir Thomas Wyatt can only be of the 
vaguest description. 

So, too, with characters. The reason why there are 
certain kinds of character and incident in any of these 
three partnership plays, is not that Dekker wrote 
them. It is that they are that kind of play. If Web- 
ster wrote a citizen's-wife-gallant play, he must have 
introduced citizens' wives and gallants, even if he did 
not do so in an Italian tragedy. On page 2 of his 
book Mr. Pierce claims that his study is useful as 
throwing light on Webster's range as an author. "If 
Webster wrote . . . the parts of Captain Jenkins and 



APPENDICES 217 

Hans Van Belch in Northward Ho, then he showed an 
element of pleasant humour and manysidedness which 
is not indicated anywhere else." In Chapter VII., 
dealing with "The Character and Atmosphere-Test," 
he quotes with approval, as proof of what is and what 
is not Dekker's, Dr. Stoll on these characters. "Mani- 
festly Dekker's too are the Dutch Drawer and Mer- 
chant, and the Welsh Captain. A Dutch Hans had 
already appeared in the Shoemaker . . . and Captain 
Jenkins ... is the counterpart of Sir Vaughan ap 
Rees in Satiro-Mastia:.'^ That is to say, these charac- 
ters of common types are Dekker's, because Dekker 
uses similar ones elsewhere, and not Webster's because 
Webster doesn't. You start out to see if Webster, 
having written only in a certain style elsewhere, wrote 
in another style here. You conclude that he has not 
written in this other style here, because he has written 
only in a certain style elsewhere ! 

Considerations of style (in the narrower sense of 
literary individuality) and vocabulary are more con- 
vincing. The only one of Mr. Pierce's tests that has 
any value in the case of Sir Thomas Wyatt — except, 
of course, the parallel-passages, taken with caution — 
is his three-syllable-Latin-word one.^ A large propor- 
tion of Latin words, and any other characteristic we 
recognise clearly as one of the later Webster's, do tend 
to prove his presence in a scene — though their absence 
does not disprove it. These slight indications of style, 
if they had arisen and become unconscious so early, 
* See the Appendix on Westward Ho and Northward Ho, 



218 JOHN WEBSTER 

are the things that would be apparent in plays of dif- 
ferent species by the same author. But the eight or ten 
years, and the probable presence of so many authors 
in this play, must make us sceptical. The latter point,' 
indeed, would falsify most of Mr. Pierce's work if it 
were sound on other grounds. He remembers, on his 
last page, that Heywood, Chettle, and Smith also have 
to be accounted for. He dismisses them too magnifi- 
cently. *'It would be useless to discuss such questions 
as these at present, since no practical results could 
follow. We have offered such evidence as we possess 
on the shares of Dekker and Webster; and here we 
stop." But though you may not have "discussed" the 
question of the relative shares of C, D., and E., in a 
play, you have definitely answered it, if you say A. 
wrote six scenes and B. the rest. The Latin-word test 
is no good unless we have Heywood's, Chettle's, and 
Smith's figures, as well as Dekker's and Webster's. It 
does not prove that Dekker wrote certain scenes and 
Webster did not, to say that Dekker employs a "sweet 
personal tone," or a market-girl with her eggs, else- 
where, and Webster does not. You have to be able to 
say that Heywood and Chettle and Smith also are 
strangers to these things. 

Miss Mary Leland Hunt, in her careful and useful 
monograph on Dekker,^ also discusses the question of 
the partition of this play. Her most original sugges- 
tion is that the main plan of the play is due to Chettle. 
She advances various indications of this ; that he was 
^Thomas Dekker: A. Study, by Mary Leland Hunt, 



APPENDICES 219 

older than Dekker (and Webster, no doubt); that 
Henslowe mentions his name first ; that he was specially 
at home in the chronicle history; and that he is more 
old-fashioned — and so more likely to have planned the 
old-fashioned structure of Sir Thomas Wyatt — than 
Dekker. Against Dekker and Webster this certainly 
holds true; and, in the midst of our uncertainties, the 
conjecture may be allowed to stand as more persuasive 
than any alternative. Beyond this. Miss Hunt has 
not much of value to contribute. She hints a vague 
approval of Fleay's attribution of scenes 1-9 to Web- 
ster, 11-17 to Dekker. But she qualifies this by giving 
Dekker parts of 7 and 9, and probably 4, and Web- 
ster 10. The pathos of the trial-scene (16), she thinks, 
points to Dekker. 

Her judgment is not very trustworthy. It is on 
emotional rather than aesthetic grounds — she attri- 
butes, I mean, a tender scene to Dekker and a gloomy 
scene to Webster, because Dekker is a tender, and 
Webster a gloomy, dramatist. 

Welcoming a suggestion of Dr. Greg's, she finds the 
speeches of Wyatt in 6 and 10 very un-Dekkerish, and 
therefore gives these scenes to Webster. (Mr. Pierce, 
more "scientifically" notices the same thing.) For 
myself, speaking with all due mistrust of human ability 
to pick out one author from another in these cases, I 
thought I too found a different note in these scenes. 
But if it is not Dekker's, it is as certainly neither the 
Webster's of 1612 nor the "Webster's" of tlie fancied 



220 JOHN WEBSTER 

Websterian parts of this play. It seems to me far 
more probably Hey wood. ^ 

The whole position is this, Sir Thomas Wyatt con- 
sists of the fragments of the first or of both of two 
plays, one by Chettle, Dekker, Heywood, Smith, and 
Webster, the other certainly by Dekker, and probably 
by the others as well. It is issued as by Webster and 
Dekker — either because they originally had the larger 
share, or because they did the editing, or because their 
names were at the moment the more likely to secure a 
sale, or because they were known as the authors of the 
play to the publisher. In any case, it was not the cus- 
tom to put more than two names to a play. On the 
whole, therefore, one must begin with an a priori prob- 
ability that most of the play as we have it is by Web- 
ster and Dekker, but that some is by Heywood or 
Smith or Chettle. In addition, the state of the play 
(the text is very uneven, sometimes fairly good, some- 
times terribly mangled), and its history of slashing and 
patching, make it likely that the different contributions 
are fairly well mixed together by now. In some places, 
certainly, a delicate reader will fancy he detects re- 
peated swift changes between more than two styles.^ 

It is obvious, then, that it is very presumptuous 
to assign different portions of the play with any com- 
pleteness to the different authors. Reading the play, 
with careful attention to style and atmosphere, I have 

* Note especially the word "ostend," p. 194. 

*e. g. the change towards the end of scene 11, at the top of 
page 196, after Suffolk's entry. 



APPENDICES 221 

seemed to myself to recognise in the bulk of two scenes 
and in one or two scattered places (e.g. the opening 
lines of the play) a voice that may well be that of the 
younger Webster. Taking, therefore, cautiously a cer- 
tain amount of positive evidence from Dr. Stoll and 
Mr. Pierce, and comparing it with my own impression 
of the play and the general impression of other critics, 
I suggest the following conclusions as all that we can 
fairly pretend to be more than amiable dreaming. 
Webster probably wrote scene 2 and most of scene 16. 
No doubt he poured indistinguishably forth other parts 
of this commonplace bit of journalism; but, except one 
or two lines, it is impossible to pick them out. A good 
deal of the rest of the play is by Dekker. Heywood's 
hand is occasionally to be suspected. 



Appendix D. — "Westward Ho" and 
"Northward Ho" 

These plays are so closely connected, and evidence 
about either reacts so much on the other, that it is 
convenient to consider them together. 

Dates, 

These plays can be dated fairly closely. 

Westward Ho was registered to print on March 
2nd, 1605. It was printed in 1607. 

Northward Ho was registered on August 6th, 1607, 
and printed in that year. 

Northward Ho contains an amiable farcical attack 
on Chapman.^ For this reason and others, it must 
have been written as an answer to Eastward Ho, which 
was registered to print September 4th, 1605, and ap- 
peared in several editions in that year, and was prob- 
ably written in 1604, perhaps in 1605.^ Eastward Ho 
was written, again, more or less in emulous succession 

* This is fairly conclusively proved by Dr. Stoll (pp. 65-69). The 
only doubtful point is that Bellamont (whom we suppose to mean 
Chapman) is called "white" and "hoary." Chapman was only 
forty-seven in 1606. But even in this age, when people live so much 
more slowly, they are sometimes silver-haired before fifty. And 
the other evidence is very strong. 

'v. Eastward Hoe, ed. F. E. Shelling. Belles Lettres Series, 
Introduction. 

222 



APPENDICES 223 

to Westward Ho.^ So we have the order of the plays 
fairly certain. Dekker and Webster wrote theirs for 
the Children of Paul's; Eastward Ho was written for 
the rival company, the children of the Queen's Revels, 
by Chapman, with the help of Jonson and Marston. 

Westward Ho, therefore, could have been written 
any time before March, 1605. The probable date of 
Eastward Ho makes it slightly desirable to put the 
performance of Westward Ho back, at least, towards 
the beginning of 1604. There are various references; 
to Kemp's London to Norwich Dance (1600) ;2 per- 
haps to James' Scotch Knights ; ^ and to the famous 
siege of Ostend.* Ostend was taken in September, 
1604, and the second quotation, at least, looks as if 
it was written after that. It may, however, have been 
written during the last part of the siege. And these 
references may, of course, not be of the same date as 
the rest of the play. But it seems fairly safe to date 
it as 1603 ^ or 1604, with a slight preference for the 
autumn of 1604.^ 

* V. Eastward Ho. Prologue. ' Westward Ho, p. 237. 

» Westward Ho. pp. 217, 326. " Westward Ho, pp. 210, 235. 

*The end of 1603, of course. All the summer the plague was 
raging. 

»a. Dr. StoU (p. 63) finds in the Earl's discovery {Westward 
Ho, 233), of a hideous hag in the masked- figure he had thought 
a beautiful woman, a possible reminiscence of Marston's Sopho- 
nisba, which may have been on the stage in 1603 or 1604. But the 
idea is a common enough one in all literatures. And if there is 
a debt, it might almost as easily be the other way. In any case, the 
date is not influenced. 

6. If the autumn of 1604, then, of course, Eastward Ho must be 
put on to 1605. 



224 JOHN WEBSTER 

Northward Ho, then, must have been written in 1605, 
1606, or 1607. In Day's The Isle of Gulls (printed 
1606) there seems to be a reference to these three 
plays, ^ in a passage that must have been written for 
a first performance ; which cuts out, at least, 1607, 
and the last part of 1606. Dr. Stoll records also ^ a 
close parallel with a passage in Marston's The Fawn, 
He thinks The Fawn is the originator, and that it was 
written in 1606.^ But he dates it by a very uncertain 
reference to an execution. It is generally dated earlier, 
and Marston may have imitated Northward Ho, or the 
passages may, as in another Marston-Webster case, 
have been taken independently otherwhence. So the 
safest date for Northward Ho is 1605.* 

Sources. 

Westward Ho and Northward Ho are ordinary 
citizen-comedies. The sources of these are generally 
unknown. The plots were probably invented or 
adapted from some current event or anecdote. As 
Mr. Arnold Bennett says (thinking of such bourgeois 
subjects as these plays deal with), there is no difficulty 
about a plot; you can get a plot any time by going 
into the nearest bar and getting into conversation over 

^ Ed. Bullen: pp. 5, 6. The reference is the more probable that 
The Isle of Gulls was written for the same company as Eastward 
Ho. 

' P. 16. « Stoll, p. 17. 

*Miss Hunt (Thomas Dekker, pp. 101-103) comes to much the 
same conclusion; i.e. Westward Ho, 1604, Eastward Ho, 1604-5, 
Northward Ho, 1605, as probable. 



APPENDICES 225 

a drink. The Elizabethans, no doubt, did this. All 
that was wanted was some intrigue on the old citizen's- 
wives-gallants theme that would allow of practical jok- 
ing, bawdy talk, and a little broad conventional char- 
acter-drawing. Dr. Stoll ^ and Mr. Pierce ^ have 
pointed out that various incidents in these plays have 
similarities in other plays of Dekker's earlier or later. 
The "borrowing" from Sophonisba I have dealt with. 
The ring story in Northward Ho is paralleled in Male- 
spini's Ducento Novelle,^ as Dr. Stoll points out. It 
can be traced further back (to the detriment of Dr. 
Stoll's suggestion that it originated in an exploit of 
some attendants on Cardinal Wolsey), to number sixty- 
two in La Sale's Les Cent nouvelles Nouvelles, a collec- 
tion of the middle of the fifteenth century.* From 
La Sale it could easily have come into any of the 
Elizabethan books of stories, directly or by degrees. 
Or it might even have been merely reinvented. 

Collahoration, 

Dr. Stoll has given some pages, and Mr. Pierce two- 
thirds of his book, to an elaborate attempt to divide 
up these plays between Dekker and Webster. It is 
not possible here to examine either their methods or 
their results in detail. I can only suggest some prin- 
ciples which should be kept in mind in attempting such 
questions, and which they have not always kept in mind, 

»Pp. 72-74. 

' The Collaboration of Webster and Dekker, Chap. VI. 

'Novella II., not I., as Dr. Stoll gives it. 

*v. Celio Malespini und seine Novellen: Misteli. 



226 JOHN WEBSTER 

and summarise their results, indicating how far they 
seem valid and valuable. I shall mostly consider Mr. 
Pierce's work, as it is later and far more detailed than 
Dr. Stoll's and includes it.-^ 

Dr. Stoll finds that the general outline and spirit 
of the plays, the characters, and most of the incidents 
are repeated in Dekker's other city-plays. On these 
grounds, and on grounds of style and phrase, he gives 
Dekker, in a general way, the whole of the plays. Mr. 
Pierce adopts a more systematic method. He employs 
various tests, "scientific" and "aesthetic," separately, 
and tabulates and compares the results. His tests are 
of the following kinds ; parallel passages ; use of dia- 
lect ; metrical ; incidents ; "character and atmosphere" ; 
and the "three-syllable Latin-word test," an invention 
of his own. The last needs explanation. Mr. Pierce 
discovered that the difference in typical passages of 
Webster and Dekker, the difference of weight and 
rhythm, is partly due to the number of long Latin 
words used by the former. He has made this into a 
regular and usable test, by reducing all Webster's and 
Dekker's plays to a common line measure, and finding 
the percentage of three-syllable words of Latin or 
Greek origin, in each scene and act. An ingenious 
plan. The results are superficially of immense decision 
and value. Webster's known plays have a high aver- 
age ; Dekker's known plays a low one. A few scenes in 
these two collaborate plays have a high average, and 

*See also a very sensible review of Mr. Pierce's book by Dr. P. 
Aronstein in Beiblatt zur Anglia, 1910, p. 79. 



APPENDICES 227 

the rest a low one. There is a wide, almost empty gap 
in between. The conclusion, especially if other tests 
agree, is obvious. 

But this test makes certain assumptions which Mr. 
Pierce does not seem to have considered. It assumes 
that the use of these three-syllable Latin words is al- 
ways independent of the subject-matter. It assumes 
that it was, even at this date, not only a habit of Web- 
ster's, but an ingrained one, and probably unconscious. 
If (and it is vety probable) he was merely forming his 
style at this time, by imitating such writers as Marston, 
he could and would drop this trick a good deal, or for- 
get to keep it up, in writing this sort of play. Writers 
are not born polysyllabic. The habit may supremely 
suit them; but they acquire it. And the process of 
acquiring it is generally conscious. When Webster 
wrote (or copied out) 

*'I remember nothing. 
There's nothing of so infinite vexation 
As man's own thoughts." 
or 

"I have caught 
An everlasting cold: I have lost my voice 
Most irrecoverably." 

he knew what he was doing as well as Mr. Henry James 
does when he writes, "She just charmingly hunched her 
eyes at him." 

If the investigators of the future draw up lists of 
the average number of adverbs to a uniform line in 
Mr. Henry James' works, they will find, probably, that 



228 JOHN WEBSTER 

in the early works it is practically normal, in the early- 
middle period uneven, varying from chapter to chap- 
ter, and for the last twenty years immense. Who they 
will think wrote the early, and collaborated in the mid- 
dle, Henry James's, it is impossible to guess. 

That this Latinism could be put on at will we have 
Dekker's The GulVs Horn-Book and passages in his 
more serious plays to witness. In spite of that it may 
be admitted that a quite high average in any scene in 
Northward Ho or Westward Ho, where Dekker would 
have no temptation to Latinise, does point to Webster. 
But what Mr. Pierce does not seem to realise is that 
a low average does not point in the same way to Dekker. 
For as there is no play of this kind by Webster extant, 
it is impossible to say how much he might have de- 
scended from Latinity at times. It is all part of the 
general error of taking, as Webster's normal usages, his 
practices in a definite kind of play in his mature period. 
Still, with these restrictions and in this way, Mr. 
Pierce's Latin-word test has a good deal of value ; that 
is to say, for deciding what is Webster's, not what is 
not. The only thing that can be urged against it is 
that it is unnecessary; being only a symptom of a dif- 
ference in style which a subtle taste should distinguish 
on its own qualities, or, if more, misleading. This is 
mostly true; and the aesthetic tests are ultimately the 
most valuable. But then it is so hard either to fix or 
to communicate them. 

The tests of metre, incident, and character and at- 
mosphere seem to me to have practically no value, ex- 



APPENDICES 229 

cept in so far as "atmosphere" means literary style. 
What it mainly means is the complexion of the whole, 
with regard to which Westward Ho Is of course much 
nearer to, say, The Honest Whore, than It is to The 
Duchess of Malfi. No doubt there are minor, barely 
visible, effects and individualities of metre, phrase, or 
character-drawing, and turns of Incident, which might 
easily betray the Dekker of this period, whom we 
know, or even the Webster, whom we fear we mightn't 
recognise. Dr. Stoll, indeed, has used these a little, for 
distinguishing Webster. But as a rule these details 
are just those one cannot tabulate. The grosser ones, 
that can be defined and listed, are the attributes of the 
species of play, such as a dramatist can put on and 
off at will. The subtler, less extricable peculiarities, 
however, are what influence the "unscientific" critical 
taste to feel, "This is Webster !" and "This Dekker !" 
They have an ultimate voice in deciding attributions, 
though by a different method from metrical or word- 
tests ; by representation rather than plebiscite. 

The second trustworthy kind of evidence, then, for 
a passage or scene being by some author, Is a percep- 
tion that the hterary and linguistic style is his. To 
use this, which Swinburne called judging by the ear in- 
stead of the fingers, is a very important method, if 
not so supreme as he thought. It is without rules ; but 
in this case there are certain general features of style 
which can be mentioned, if not tabulated. For Dekker 
there is the half-comical, quick, repetition of phrases, 
that Dr. Stoll has noticed. There is an important un- 



230 JOHN WEBSTER 

observed characteristic of Webster's, which is ex- 
tremely noticeable in his later works, and seems to ap- 
pear in those portions of these plays which, on stylistic 
and other grounds, we are led to believe his. It is in 
marked contrast to Dekker. It is the use of involved 
sentences with subordinate clauses, as against a style 
where the ideas are expressed in a series of simpler, 
shorter, co-ordinate sentences. Northward Ho, II. 2, 
one of the only certainly Websterian scenes in the two 
plays, strikes the ear immediately as different in this 
way. The whole ring of the sentences is — mainly for 
this reason — slower, deeper, more solemn. The Ger- 
mans have invented a way of distinguishing collabora- 
tors. Read the play, they say, and you find your 
voice instinctively assumes a different pitch for the 
work of different authors. They profess to tell to half 
a sentence where Webster begins and Dekker leaves off. 
One can smile at their whole claim. But, for these two 
authors, it is not, essentially, unmeaning. 

The third admissible way of dividing the authorship 
of these plays, is by parallel passages. It is not gen- 
erally kept in mind that if this method is used for de- 
ciding between collaborators, it implies an assumption 
that the collaboration was of a certain kind, namely, 
by taking so many scenes each. This was the usual 
practice in contemporary collaboration, we know; and 
it is, obviously, far the quickest and easiest way, as a 
rule. So we have a right, generally, to suppose that 
collaboration was of this sort, and, therefore, that a 
certain parallel or repetition is strong proof of au- 



APPENDICES 231 

thorship of that scene. All the same, there is always 
the possibility of both authors working over the same 
scene, in which case, of course, a parallel helps to prove 
nothing except its own source. In the present case, 
though we do not know so certainly as with Webster's 
earlier plays. Sir Thomas Wyatt or Christmas comes 
hut once a year, that the collaboration was real and 
contemporary, it is very likely. The likelihood is made 
smaller than usual by the facts that Dekker was a 
much quicker worker than Webster, and that he was 
by standing and experience the senior partner. He 
might very well have gone over Webster's scenes. 

On the whole then a single parallel or repetition 
does not prove much, in these plays ; a row of them, in 
one scene, goes far to establish the authorship of that 
scene. 

Mr. Pierce has collected a great number of possible 
parallels, most of them insignificant, some of them 
very valuable. In using them, one must remember that 
we have only a very few, and quite different, later plays 
by Webster to draw on, and a great many, some con- 
temporary and similar, of Dekker's. Once again, ab- 
sence of proof that a scene is Webster's does not prove 
it is not. 

By these methods of proof, and any outstanding 
evidence of another kind, one reaches much the same 
conclusions as Mr. Pierce; but, I think, they should 
be applied differently. In Northward Ho, II. 2, and 
the first part of V., are almost certainly in the main by 
Webster. In Westward Ho there is not, it seems to 



232 JOHN WEBSTER 

me, the same certainty. But I. 1 and III. 3 show very 
strong traces of his presence. With Northward Ho, 

1. 1 and III. 1 the probability is smaller, but still con- 
siderable. There are also one or two phrases or sen- 
tences scattered about the plays that arrest one's at- 
tention as recognisably Webster's, or at least not Dek- 
ker's. But these do not extend their atmosphere be- 
yond themselves. There are these few scenes, which, 
with varying degrees of probability, can be given to 
Webster. There are a few more {Westward Ho, II. 1, 

2, V. 3: Northward Ho, IV. 1) where all the evidence 
points to Dekker being mainly responsible. In the 
rest, while we cannot detect the Webster of 1612, we 
have no right to deny the presence of the Webster of 
1605. In any case the collaboration seems to have been 
of an intricate and over-laid nature. 

To pretend to more precise knowledge is, I think, 
silly. 

Since I wrote this. Miss Hunt's book on Thomas 
Dekker has appeared. On pages 106, 107, and 108 she 
discusses the shares of Webster and Dekker in these 
plays. She principally follows Fleay, whose methods 
were rough. She discusses the responsibility for the 
plots, which other critics have been inclined to leave 
vaguely to Dekker. She would give most of it to Web- 
ster, and also "the more unusual subtle or abnormal 
incidents" ; the device of the diamond in Westward Ho 
and that of the ring in Northward Ho, perhaps also 
Greeneshield's betrayal of his wife, although that may 
have been borrowed from Eastward Ho, Also Jus- 



APPENDICES 233 

tiniano's disguise as a hag; and his and Mayberry's 
jealousy. Other kinds of evidence she does not con- 
sider. In Westward Ho she finds signs of incomplete 
collaboration and change of plan in construction. Still 
following Fleay she thinks Webster wrote most of Acts 
I., II., and III., and some of IV. ; Dekker, the rest. 
Northward Ho is more homogeneous. Dekker is given 
the Chapman-ragging and the Doll scenes ; Webster the 
rest. Dekker probably went over the whole. 

Her proofs and judgments are very superficial, and 
almost valueless. It is, perhaps, probable that Web- 
ster had more share in the planning of the plots and 
incidents than he has been allowed. Her assignments 
in general are based on a feeling that these two plays 
are "gross," "offensive," and "sinning against the 
light," that her protege Dekker, being a pure-minded 
man, can have had little to do with them, and that 
Webster "who dealt with lust" must be held guilty. 
Her sex, or her nationality, or both, have caused in 
her a curious agitation of mind whenever she ap- 
proaches these plays. This prejudice destroys what 
little value her very cursory investigation of the prob- 
lems of their authorship might otherwise have had. 



Appendix E. — "The Malcontent" 

The Malcontent was published in 1604, in two edi- 
tions. The title-page of the first reads : 

THE 
MALCONTENT. 

BY JOHN MARSTON. 

The title-page of the second reads: 

THE 
MALCONTENT. 

AUGMENTED BY MARSTON. 

WITH THE ADDITIONS PLAYED BY THE KINGS 
MAJESTIES SERVANTS. 

WRITTEN BY JOHN WEBSTER. 

The second edition differs from the first in having an 
Induction, and the insertion of twelve passages in the 
play. 

Much fuss has been made about the amount of the 
play that Webster wrote. Dr. Stoll ^ has conclusively 
shown that all we can deduce to be Webster's is the 
iPp. 55-60. 

234 



APPENDICES 235 

Induction ; and Professor Vaughan has called attention 
to a final piece of evidence — that the Induction itself 
practically says that this is the case. 

The matter is quite clear. The full-stop after 
"Servants" on the second title-page is what Dr. Stoll 
calls "purely inscriptional." That the whole theory 
of Elizabethan punctuation rests on a psychological, 
not, as now, on a logical basis, has recently been shown 
with great force by Mr. Simpson.^ The whole look of 
the page makes it obvious that the intention was to 
connect Webster with the "Additions," and only with 
the additions, and to make Marston responsible for the 
augmentations as well as the bulk of the play. An aes- 
thetic judgment of the play declares that the extra 
passages are all Marston's and that the Induction is 
probably not by Marston and probably is by Webster. 
And Burbadge, in the Induction, describing how the 
play fell into the hands of the King's Servants (from 
the Children of the Queen's Revels) and being asked 
"What are your additions?" makes answer, "Sooth, 
not greatly needful; only as your salad to your great 
feast, to entertain a little more time, and to abridge 
the not-received custom of music in our theatre." That 
probably, though not quite necessarily, identifies the 
"additions" with the Induction. There are three pos- 
sible theories ; that Marston wrote The Malcontent 
(first edition) and the extra passages, and Webster 

^Shakespearian Punctuation. See also Professor Grierson's re- 
marks on Elizabethan punctuation, The Poems of John Donne, vol. 
ii., pp. cxxi.-cxxiv. 



236 JOHN WEBSTER 

the Induction; that Marston wrote The Malcontent 
(first edition) and Webster the extra passages, and 
probably the Induction; or that originally Marston 
and Webster wrote the play together, and that fof 
some reason only Marston's name appeared on the 
title-page. I think there is no reason to believe the 
third, every reason not to believe the second, and sev- 
eral reasons to believe the first. I do not think the 
arguments for The Malcontent dating from 1600, and 
for the "augmentations" being really restorations by 
Marston of cut pieces of his play in its first state, are 
decisive. But I think the case stands without these 
conclusions.* 

Date, 

As the first edition appeared without the Induction 
during 1604, and the second with it in the same year, 
and as it was obviously written for a special piratical 
revival by the King's Majesty's Servants, who claim 
the second edition, it is fair to suppose that the In- 
duction was written during 1604. 

*On the date of The Malcontent Dr. StoU goes off pursuing the 
wildest of geese through the undergrowth of a footnote. He 
"proves" a phrase to be in the "Ur-Hamlet" by taking it for 
granted that a play printed in 1604 is exactly as it was when it 
was written in 1600. The old assumption of the integrity of plays. > 



Appendix F. — "The White Devil" 

Date. 

The White Devil was printed in 1612. It obviously 
belongs to the same period as The Duchess of Malfi. 
That it is the earlier of the two is probable on general 
grounds, and proved by the advance of metrical li- 
cense ^ and the absence of phrases and adaptations 
from the Arcadia, which are present in all Webster's 
later work.^ 

There are various clues, of more or less relevance, 
to its date: 

Mr. Percy Simpson has pointed out ^ that the puz- 
zling and much emended passage about Perseus (p. 21 ; 
last line) is an allusion to Jonson's Masque of Queens 
(1609); a work Webster knew, for he borrows in A 
Monumental Column from the dedication to it. 

P. 23. MoNTiCELso. Away with her! 

Take her hence! 
ViTTORiA. A rape ! a rape ! 

MONTICELSO. How? 

ViTTORiA. Yes, you have ravished Justice; 

Forced her to do your pleasure. 

* V. Stoll, p. 190, metrical table. 

' V. Crawford, Collectanea, i., 20-46. It is very noticeable, and 
only to be explained by Webster having filled his notebook from 
the Arcadia after The White Devil and before The Duchess of 
Malfi, A Monumental Column, and The Devil's Law-case. 

'Modern Language Review: January 1907. 

237 



238 JOHN WEBSTER 

Dr. Stoll suggests that Vittoria's cry, in its sudden- 
ness as well as in the words, is very like Sebastian's 
in Tourneur's The Atheisfs Tragedy, I. 4. But any 
connection between the two is doubtful ; if there is any, 
Tourneur may have imitated Webster ; and anyhow the 
date of The Atheisfs Tragedy is still quite uncertain 
— 1607-1611 is the most definite limit one can venture, 
and even that rather depends on accepting the anony- 
mous Revenger* s Tragedy as Tourneur's. This pas- 
sage is more likely to be connected with The Tragedy 
of Chahoty V. 11, 122, "unto this he added a most 
prodigious and fearful rape, a rape even upon Justice 
itself. . . ." Professor Parrott thinks Chapman may 
have written this (it is in his part of the play) about 
1612. And Webster admired and imitated Chapman. 
But the whole thing is too cloudy for the resemblance 
to be more than interesting. 

The number of references to Ireland in the play is 
remarkable.^ Either Webster had been in Ireland, or 
he had been hearing about it, or he had been reading a 
book on it. If it was a book, Bamaby Rich's A New 
Description of Ireland, 1610, has been suggested. It 
is very probable ; for the book mentions the various sub- 
jects of Webster's references. But as there is no ver- 
bal connection, and as they are all things one could 
easily pick up by hearsay, the proof is not conclusive. 
No doubt, too, there were other books on Ireland at 

*See p. 6. Irish gamesters: p. 16, no snakes in Ireland: p. 28, 
Irish rebels selling heads: p. 29 "like the wild Irish. . . .": p 31, 
Irish funerals. 



APPENDICES 239 

the time which might have contained such obvious jour- 
nalistic prattle as this. Still, Rich's book is the best 
explanation of Webster's mind being so full of Irish 
facts at the time : and the references are scattered 
enough to make a little against them having been intro- 
duced in a revision. For what this sort of evidence is 
worth, it points to 1610 or after. 

Dr. Stoll attaches importance to the preface and 
postscript. These, it would in any case be extremely 
probable, were written in 1612 for the publication 
of the book. And a pretty conclusive borrowing of 
phrase from Jonson's preface to Catalme (1611)^ con- 
firms this. Dr. Stoll thinks the tone of the preface 
shows that the performance was recent. It is difficult 
to see why. Webster merely says that the play has 
been performed, without much success. His only hint 
about the time that has elapsed since lies in "and that, 
since that time [i.e. the time of the performance], I 
have noted most of the people that come to that play- 
house resemble those ignorant asses, who, visiting sta- 
tioners' shops, their use is not to inquire for good 
books but new books. . . ." This looks as if some time 
had gone by between the performance and the writing 
of the preface. He had had time to see and deplore 
The White Devil being forgotten by the "ignorant 
asses" who only wanted "new" goods. An interval of 
some months should be allowed at least. 

The preface gives the further information that the 

*See Stoll, pp. 20, 21. Webster borrows most of this preface 
from prefaces of Jonson and Dekker. 



240 JOHN WEBSTER 

performance had been in winter, and that the play had 
taken a long time in writing. 

There is one more point. Dekker, writing an Epistle 
Dedicatory to // This be not a Good Flay ^ addressed 
to the Queen's Servants (who produced The White 
Devil) ^ wishes well to a new play by a "worthy friend" 
of his. It has been suggested that this means The 
White Devil. Dekker and Webster were old friends, 
and the vague complimentary epithets of the play 
apply.^ It may be so. But as between twenty and 
thirty new plays were produced every year,^ and the 
Queen's Servants, no doubt, contributed their share, 
there were a good many other plays Dekker might have 
been thinking of, and we cannot regard this as more 
than a possible conjecture. // This he not a Good Play 
was probably written and played in 1610 or 1611. The 
Epistle Dedicatory for the printed edition would prob- 
ably be written for the occasion, i.e. in 1612 or the 
end of 1611. So any weight this conjecture has would 
point to Webster's play being produced in the begin- 
ning of 1612.* 

•Printed 1612. 

' "Such brave Triumphs of Poesy and elaborate industry . . ." 

' V. Schelling, Elizabethan Drama, ii. pp. 371, 373. Malone and 
Fleay both suggest an average of twenty-three or four a year. 
This period was more prolific than the average, of course. For 
1601-1611 Professor Schelling surmises a yearly average of nearer 
thirty. 

* Dr. Stoll offers the additional proof that Dekker is speaking of 
a maiden effort, which The White Devil is. Mere assumptions. 
Dekker does not say the object of his interest is a maiden work. 
And nobody can state that The White Devil is. 



APPENDICES 241 

The similarity of style and atmosphere and the close 
resemblance of a great many passages ^ (not verbal 
repetitions, far more subtle and convincing things than 
that) make it desirable to put The White Devil and 
The Duchess of Malfi as close together as possible. 
The tenuous evidence we have noticed points, if any- 
where at all, to agreement with this — that is, to put- 
ting The White Devil on towards its final limit of 1612. 
Acknowledging that it is all quite uncertain, I think 
it is most probable that the play was written during 
1611 and performed at the end of that year or in 
January or February, 1612. It may have been writ- 
ten 1610 and performed 1610-1611. It would need 
some strong new evidence to put it back further. 

Sources. 

Some time and trouble have been spent in seeking 
an exact printed source for The White Devils but, so 
far, in vain. The actual events, which took place in 
the end of the sixteenth century — Vittoria was born 
in 1557, was murdered in 1585 — were well-known.^ 
Did Webster get the story from an accurate history, 
from some romantic version, or from hearsay? One 
can only surmise. Professor Vaughan, who goes at 
greatest length into this question, thinks it quite pos- 
sible the source was a novel or play, or an oral account, 

^ See, for examples, Sampson, Introduction to The White Devil, 
etc., pp. xli.-xliii. and Stoll, pp. 80-82. 

^ For detailed accounts see D. Gnoli, Vittoria Accoramboni. J. 
A. Symonds, in Italian By-ways (1883): L. M'Cracken, A Page of 
Forgotten History. 



242 JOHN WEBSTER 

but is most in favour of Webster having read some 
fairly accurate contemporary account, and altered it 
for dramatic purposes. Webster's unusually accurate 
pronunciation of Italian names, and his quoting Tasso,-^ 
allow us to believe he may have known Italian. But the 
tale may well have got into an English or French ver- 
sion by 1610. The differences between Webster's ver- 
sion and the facts are queer. Many of them look cer- 
tainly as if they had been made consciously (by Web- 
ster or someone else) for dramatic purposes; such as — 
besides the additions of madness and murders — the 
toning down of Lodovico to make him a minor figure, 
and the purification of Isabella. But there are others 
that have no such obvious point, the exchange of names 
between Marcello and Flamineo, the writing of Monti- 
celso for Montalto,^ and Paul IV. for Sixtus V. The 
first of these may be purposeful. Even one who has 
not read the Sixth iEneid may be able to perceive that 
Marcello is a pure young hero and Flamineo an amaz- 
ing villain. Is it fanciful to more than suspect that 
The White DevU would be less effective if he were called 
Flamineo who died so innocently, and a Marcello played 
amazing tricks with buUetless pistols, or screamed in 
mock-death : 

* The Duchess of Malfi, p. 78. 

'^Dr. Greg (Modern Language Quarterly: Dec. 1900) suggests 
that Webster may have misread (in, perhaps, a MSS. account) 
Moncelto for Montalto, and euphonised it into Monticelso. But 
the other difficulties remain. 



APPENDICES 243 

"O I smell soot. 
Most stinking soot! The chimney is a-fire! 
My liver's parboil'd like Scotch holly-bread; 
There's a plumber laying pipes in my guts, 

it scalds!" 



It is not for nothing that you dare not call a hero 
Lord John or a villain George. And Webster, who had 
above all things a nose for irrelevant details that inex- 
plicably trick you, unconscious, into the tone he desires, 
may have had a purpose in writing also Paulus for 
Sixtus, Monticelso for Montalto. Still, it is hard to 
think memory or report or notes did not play him false. 
On the other hand such minute details from the 
actual story have been preserved by Webster — names, 
the summer-house by the Tiber, and so on — that it is 
difficult to imagine that he got it from any scanty or 
oral report. And there are certain consideration^ 
which seem to favour his having worked from some ex- 
tensive version, whether dramatic or in pamphlet form. 
Why should Brachiano and the Conjuror conduct their 
interview in Vittoria's house (p. 18)? No reason is 
given for the absurdity. There is an equally unex- 
plained and apparently pointless incident in the trial- 
scene ; where Brachiano refuses a chair, and sits on his 
cloak (pp. 19 and 22), to show, one gathers, his con- 
tempt for the Court. The labour and time Webster 
spent on the play, and his care in publishing this edi- 
tion to wipe out the failure of the performance, forbid 
our explaining these things by hurry in composition, or 
by the text being printed from an acting version. They 



244 JOHN WEBSTER 

might well be the result of Webster's obvious lack of 
ordinary skill in dramatising a story of which he had 
a lengthy version before him. Such incidents as Fran- 
cisco's sight of Isabella's ghost, and the spectacular 
and fairly accurate ceremony of choosing a Pope, as 
well as the divergencies in the characters of Francisco 
and Flamineo, as the play proceeds, also fit in well with 
this theory. 

If Webster was working from some detailed account, 
it might either be a play or a narrative. In favour of 
the play are some of the extraordinary old-fashioned 
tags in The White Devil, and particularly the amazing 
mixture of extremely fine and true lines and distress- 
ingly ludicrous couplets or phrases in the final scene 
(though such incongruities are far more possible for 
Webster than for any other great writer of the period). 
In this case, the characteristics of the dramatisation 
are due to the earlier play-wright. 

On the other hand, the general line of the play gives 
the impression that Webster himself dramatised it di- 
rectly. 

In any case, from the details of names mentioned 
above, it looks as if someone, either Webster or an 
intermediate, had read some accurate account with 
care, making a few notes perhaps, had let it simmer 
into shape in his mind, the characters taking life and 
individuality, and then, later, written it out. Only so 
can the mistakes of memory be explained. Whether 
it was Webster who did this, or whether, as Professor 



APPENDICES 245 

Vaughan implies, he had someone else's account before 
him as he worked, it is impossible to say. 

The State of the Play. 

The White Devil is certainly entirely Webster's. It 
is also almost certain we have the whole play. There 
are no sure traces of revision for acting, or of abbrevi- 
ation. Webster obviously, from his Preface, brought 
the play out with great self-consciousness and care, and 
a desire to see its merits recognised. So he would 
naturally print it complete. And both the Preface and 
general probabilities point to it having only been played 
once, not very successfully, before publication. So we 
need not suspect our copy of having been revised for a 
revival. 



Appendix G. — "The Duchess of Malfi" 

Date. 

The history of the various opinions about the date 
of The Duchess of Malfi is both entertaining and in- 
structive. Dyce used to guess at 1616. Fleay put it 
back to 1612, a date which many shght indications 
favoured. These were mainly on styHstic and general 
grounds. Professor Vaughan, however, in 1900, made 
a suggestion which Dr. Stoll, in 1905, worked out and 
regarded as providing conclusive evidence. So, accord- 
ing to the ordinary methods of dating plays, it did. 
It is not necessary to detail Dr. Stoll's arguments. 
They refer to the oddly introduced passage in I, i. (p. 
59) on the French King and his court. Dr. Stoll 
rightly says it is very probable a passage like this in an 
Elizabethan play would refer to current events. He 
exhaustively proves that it does exactly fit what hap- 
pened in France in the early part of 1617, when Louis 
XIII. had the evil counsellor Concini killed, "quitted" 
his palace of "infamous persons," and established a 
"most provident council" ; events which made some stir 
in England at the time. As all this would have ap- 
peared in a different light in 1618 or after, and as there 
is other evidence that The Duchess of Malfi was being 
played in England at the end of 1617, we seem to have 
the date, the latter part of 1617, fixed with unusual 

246 



APPENDICES 247 

certainty.^ It is rare to he able to be so certain and so 
precise about an Elizabethan play. And having the 
date of composition of some thirty lines fixed, people 
would no doubt have gone on for ever believing they 
had the date of the whole fixed; had not Dr. Wallace, 
delving in the Record Office, discovered that William 
Ostler, who played Antonio, died on December 16th, 
1614 ! ^ The explanation, of course, is that The Duchess 
of Malfi was written and performed before December, 
1614, and revived with additions in 1617. All the evi- 
dence we have shows that this habit of altering a play 
and putting in topical references whenever it was re- 
vived, was universal. Our modern reverence for the 
exact written word is the result of regarding plays as 
literary objects, and of our too careful antiquarian 
view of art. The Elizabethans would have thought it 
as absurd not to alter a play on revival as we think 
it to do so. They healthily knew that the life of a play 
was in its performance, and that the more you inter- 
ested people by the performance, the better it was. The 
written words are one kind of raw material for a per- 
formance; not the very voice of God. So, naturally, 
they changed the play each time ; and when we have the 
text of a play, all we can feel in the least certain about, 
is that we have it something as it was for the latest 

*See, for instance. Professor Schelling, Elizabethan Drama, vol. 
i, p. 590. "This fixes the date of The Duchess of Malfi at a time 
later than April, 1617, and puts to rest once and for all former 
surmises on the subject." This eternal rest lasted nearly five years. 

' See The Times, Oct. 2 and 4, 1909. 



248 JOHN WEBSTER 

previous revival. Editors and critics have come to ad- 
mit this, in general. But in individual instances they 
never remember to allow for it. Occasionally, as here, 
other circumstances are discovered, and put them right. 
But, on the whole, the common credulous assumption 
of certainty about dates in Elizabethan literature is as 
startling to an onlooker as the credulous assumption of 
certainty about authorship. 

The Duchess of Malfi, then, was acted before Decem- 
ber, 1614; and as Webster obviously took as long over 
it as he confessedly did over The White Devil, the latest 
date we can give him for writing it is during the whole 
year of 1614. As it is later than The White Devil, we 
do not want to put it back beyond 1612, though as The 
White DeviVs date is uncertain we could do so. 

Strong internal evidence for the date of The Duchess 
of Malfi has, however, been pointed out by Mr. Craw- 
ford.^ His arguments rest mainly on the great sim- 
ilarity between The Duchess of Malfi and A Monumental 
Column. These are connected far more closely than any 
of Webster's works in several ways. The poem repeats 
both more words and lines and more ideas from The 
Duchess of Malfi than from any of the other plays. In 
metre it is, allowing for the different styles, nearer. If 
you examine the particular sources Webster borrowed 
from, the resemblance becomes even more obvious. In 
The White Devil he does not borrow from Sidney's Ar- 
cadia at all. In The DeviVs Law-Case the borrowing is 

* Collectanea, Series i. pp. 30-46, and especially Series 11. pp. 
1-63. 



APPENDICES 249 

faint and patchy. In The Duchess of Malfi and A Movr 
umental Column the borrowing is incessant and similar, 
and includes imitation of style. Another work both 
pieces borrow from, and only these two pieces among 
Webster's, is Donne's An Anatomy of the World, which 
was published in 1612.^ There are also ^ in The Duch- 
ess of Malfi several imitations and borrowings of phrase 
from another book of 1612, Chapman's Petrarch's 
Seven Penitential Psalms. But the similarity itself of 
A Monumental Column and The Duchess of Malfi, puts 
the date of the play further on than this. A Monumen- 
tal Column is an elegy written in memory of Prince 
Henry, who died on November 6th, 1612. It was pub- 
lished in 1613, with similar elegies of Tourneur's and 
Heywood's. It appears to have been rather belated, for 
(lines 259-268) he refers to other elegies that had al- 
ready appeared, and adds : 

"For he's a reverend subject to be penn'd 
Only by his sweet Homer and my friend.'* 

i.e., only Chapman should write about the dead Prince. 
From this and from various reminiscences in A Monu- 
Tnental Column, I\Ir. Crawford deduces that Webster 
must have seen Chapman's Epicedium on Prince Henry. 
I do not think it is proved; for the passage may only 
mean that Chapman ought to write an elegy. In any 
case. Chapman's poem followed the Prince's death so 

^In its entirety. Without The Second Anniversary in 1611. But 
Webster borrows from the whole. 
' Crawford Collectanea, ii. 55-58. 



250 JOHN WEBSTER 

closely (as the other elegies Webster refers to also may 
well have done) that we cannot put A Monumental Col- 
umn much later for this. But (lines 10^-5) there is a 
probable, though not certain, reference to Chapman's 
The Masque of The Middle Temple performed Febru- 
ary 15, 161S. A Monumental Column, therefore, may 
be dated any time in the half-year December, 1612- 
May 1613, with a slight preference for February and 
March 1613. As The Duchess of Malfl was certainly 
before the end of 1614, and certainly after the begin- 
ning of 1612, and as there is so much evidence that the 
play and the poem were being written at the same time, 
we may date the play with fair certainty at 1613, in- 
cluding perhaps the latter part of 1612. 

There is no other evidence of any value for the date 
of The Duchess of Malfi. It may appear that I have 
been trying to establish the earlier limit by that method 
I have always decried elsewhere, namely, by dating the 
whole by the date of various passages. The answer is 
that in the case of Tlie Duchess of Malfi and A Monu- 
mental Column the borrowings from other authors are 
so numerous, so widespread, and so much part of the 
whole play, that the likelihood of them having all been 
introduced in revision is very small. Such a revision 
would have to be a complete rewriting of the play. And 
while we must allow for the possibility of revision in any 
Elizabethan play, we cannot suppose that the writers of 
that age took the trouble to rewrite their plays, in tone, 
from beginning to end. 



APPENDICES 251 

Sources, 

It is certain that Webster got the story of The Duch- 
ess of Malfi from Painter's Palace of Pleasure^ Novel 
XXIII. Painter had it from Belleforest, who had it 
from Bandello. A recent Italian book shews that Ban- 
dello probably based his account on the testimony of 
actors in the actual events, and suggests that he may 
even have been himself one of them, the one whom we 
know as Delio.-^ It is an alluring speculation. 

Beyond this, the tortures of the Duchess were sug- 
gested, probably, by incidents in Sidney's Arcadia. The 
same book, which gave Webster so much even in phrases 
and sentences, may have been responsible for much in 
the Duchess's character, and for the echo-scene (V. 3). 
These are less certain. Mr. Crawford with greater 
probability thinks that V. 1., the scene of Delio's and 
Julia's suits to Pescara, was suggested from Montaigne, 
Book 1.2 

State of the Play. 

I have already explained some of the reasons for 
thinking there was a revival of The Duchess of Malfi 
in the latter half of 1617. They are, briefly, these. 
The first fifty lines of the play obviously refer to events 
which happened in France in April 1617, and roused 
immediate interest in England. They could not have 

^Giovanna d'Aragona, Duchessa d'Amalfi, da Domenico Morel- 
lini, 1906. V. review by W. W. Greg in Modern Language Re- 
view, July 1907. 

^ Collectanea, ii. pp. 14, 15. 



252 JOHN WEBSTER 

been written after about May 1618, when these events 
were seen in a quite different light. Also, the chaplain 
to the Venetian Ambassador in England has left a de- 
scription of a play he saw in London, which is probably, 
but not certainly, The Duchess of Malfi} He did not 
get to London before the beginning of October 1617, 
and he seems to have seen the play a little time before 
the 7th February 1618. 

The Actors' list in the first edition allows of a revival 
of this date. 

The Duchess of Malfi, then, was revived in a revised 
form in the latter part of 1617. That the beginning 
of the play was revised we know. If the Italian chap- 
lain's account of the play be accurate, there must have 
been a good deal in the performance he saw which is 
not in the play as we have it — even allowing for his 
misinterpretation. 

One passage in the play itself may point to a com- 
bination of two versions. In I. 1., (p. 61) Delio use- 
fully questions Antonio about the other chief charac- 
ters. Antonio gives a long description of the Cardinal; 
then a long description of the Duke, his brother ; then, 
before going on to the Duchess, he reverts suddenly to 
the Cardinal, as if he had not mentioned him, with: 

"Last, for his brother there, the Cardinal. . . .'* 

On the other hand, the inclusion in the first quarto 
(1623) of Middleton, Rowley, and Ford's commenda- 

» V. StoU, p. 29. 



APPENDICES 253 

tory verses, and of Webster's dedicatory letter, as well 
as, and more forcibly than, the avowal of the title-page,* 
go to show that this edition of the play is as Webster 
would have had it. It must, therefore, be fairly near 
the original version (1613); containing most of that, 
with whatever of subsequent additions or changes Web- 
ster supposed improvements. And we cannot doubt 
that practically all of the play, as we have it, is by 
Webster. 

^ "The perfect and exact Copy, with divers things printed, that 
the length of the play would not bear in presentment." 



Appendix H. — "A Monumental Column" 

Date. 

The question of the date of A Monumental Column 
is discussed in Appendix G in connection with The 
Duchess of Malfi, It must have been written within 
some six months after November 1612 ; probably about 
March 1613. 

Sources. 

There is, of course, no special source for a poem like 
this. It repeats the usual thoughts in elegies of its 
kind ; and borrows largely in expressions and in general 
style from Donne ; also from Sidney, Chapman, and Ben 
Jonson. 



254 



Appendix I. — "The Devil's Law-Case" 

Date. 

The DeviTs Law-Case was published in 1623. There 
is little evidence to decide the date of its writing. 

( 1 ) There is a reference ( IV. 2 ) to an affray in the 
East Indies : 

"How ! go to the East Indies ! and so many Hollanders 
gone to fetch sauce for their pickled herrings ! 
Some have been peppered there too lately." 

This almost certainly refers to a Djitch attack in 
August 1619 on some English ships engaged in loading 
pepper. News seems to have taken from nine to fifteen 
months to travel between England and the East Indies. 
London might learn, then, of this pepper business any 
time in the latter half of 1620. The word "lately," 
and still more the comparative unimportance and tran- 
sience of the event, suggest that the form of the play in 
which this sentence occurred was being acted towards 
the end of 1620 or in the first half of 1621. If that 
form was the only form, we cannot tell ; and we have no 
right to assume it. The whole of the reference to the 
East Indies is comprised in a few sentences in this one 
place. It is entirely unnecessary to the plot, and it 
could easily have been inserted at a moment's notice. 

255 



256 JOHN WEBSTER 

(2) It is said that the chief idea in the play, Leo- 
nora's attempt to bastardise her son by confessing a 
long-past adultery that as a matter of fact never took 
place, resembles stories in the pseudo-Marlovian Lust^s 
Dominion^ The Spanish Curate, by Fletcher and Mas- 
singer, and The Fair Maid of the Inn, by Massinger 
and another. The Fair Maid of the Inn was probably 
not written before 1624. The Spanish Curate was writ- 
ten between March and October 1622. It is only just 
possible that The DeviVs Law-Case can have been writ- 
ten after it.^ Gerardo the Unfortunate Spaniard, an 
English translation from the Spanish, which appeared 
in March 1622 and was the source of The Spanish 
Curate, may also have suggested this part of The 
Devil's Law-Case, But resemblances are tricky things. 
This one, closely examined, turns out to depend largely 
on having the confession of a past misdemeanour at a 
public trial. And to bring in a public trial is exactly 
the thing that would independently occur to the mind of 
a dramatist of circa 1620, if he imagined or heard of 
the rest of the story. The only resemblance that really 
may mean anything is to Lusfs Dominion, where a 
widow has a grudge against her son, because of a man 
she is in love with. So, to defame him and deprive him 
of the inheritance, she invents, with details, and publicly 
confesses, a story which makes him a bastard. The 
motives and feelings of the characters in this play cor- 
respond far more than in those others, to The Devil's 
Law-Case situation. It is true Lust's Dominion is an 

» V. StoU, p. 32. 



APPENDICES 257 

old play of 1590. But it may have been revived and 
revised many times. Perhaps it "suggested" the idea 
of The DeviVs Lam-Case — in any of the million ways, 
direct and indirect, in which, in real life, ideas are sug- 
gested. But the truth is that, unless a very certain 
source is known, the search for the suggestion of so 
unexotic an idea as this becomes rather foolish. A half- 
remembered story, a friend's anecdote, an inspiration — 
anything may be responsible for any proportion of it. 
It may be useful to trace John Keats' hippocrene; 
not his porridge. 

(3)^ The title-page says that the play was "ap- 
provedly well acted by Her Majesty's Servants." This 
company, which also performed The White Devils was 
called by this name until March 1619, when Queen 
Anne died. It appears to have gone gradually to pieces 
after that. Thomas Heywood, for instance, seems to 
have left it by 1622. In July 1622, it was recon- 
structed, with children as well as adults, as "The 
Players of the Revels." It probably broke up in the 
next year. The point is, under what name did it go 
between 1619 and 1622.? Under the old one of "Her 
Majesty's Servants," thinks Dr. Stoll. Mr. Murray, 
the latest investigator of the history of the Dramatic 
Companies, says it was called by the name of "The Red 
Bull," its theatre. What evidence there is seems to in- 
dicate this. The corresponding (or same) company on 
tour was generally known as "The late Queen Anne's 

*For this paragraph v. English Dramatic Companies, 1558-1642, 
by John Tucker Murray: esp. vol. i. pp. 193-200. 



258 JOHN WEBSTER 

players." We should have expected one of these two 
latter names, if the play had been performed only be- 
tween 1619 and 1622. This consideration by itself 
makes a slight, a quite slight, probability of the play 
being acted before March 1619. 

Altogether, therefore, we can only say that the play 
is earlier than July 1622, and was almost certainly 
being acted in some form in about August 1620-July 
1621. Everything else is quite uncertain; except that 
the nature of the play forbids you to look earlier than, 
at earliest, 1610. The tiny probability of 1620 or 
after, for the whole play, established by the East Indies 
reference, is about balanced by the tiny probability of 
before 1619, established by the name of the Company. 
For charts and lists one would say 1620, 

Sources, 

Perhaps, for the main idea, Lusfs Dominion. See 
under Date (2). The episode of Romelio's remedial 
stabbing is from Goulart's Histoires Admirable s, prob- 
ably in Grimeston's translation (1607) ; a source Web- 
ster used also for his lycanthropy in The Duchess of 
Malfi, 

The State of the Play, 

There is no reason to suppose that any part of the 
play is not by Webster, or that it has been much ab- 
breviated or revised. The title-page (1623) avows it 
"the true and perfect copy, from the original." It 
may be true. But that the original may have borne 



APPENDICES 259 

Signs of alterations for stage purposes, is suggested 
by the fact that (pp.126, 127) on three separate occa- 
sions in III. 3, the 1623 edition has "Surgeon" where 
it ought to be "Surgeons," for there were two surgeons 
in the case. It would have lessened the dramatic effect 
but not hurt the plot to reduce these two to one, and 
it is just the kind of change that might have been made 
in order to use fewer actors. Her Majesty's Servants 
were on the downhill when they acted this play. And 
if this change was made for acting, others may have 
been. 



Appendix J. — "A Cure for a Cuckold" 

Date. 

A Cure for a CucTcoM was published in 1661. 

(1) It is necessary at one point that a sea-fight 
should have taken place and be narrated. The English 
merchant-ships are reported to have been attacked by 
three Spanish men-of-war, off Margate. From its style 
this play must date from the end of James', or from 
Charles', reign. At any period the dramatist would be 
likely to attribute fighting, in a play of contemporary 
life, to the actual enemies of England of the time ; and 
at this period he would be especially unlikely to offend 
by suggesting enmity with any friend of the rulers of 
the country. So we may find it probable these lines 
were written between 1624 and 1630 (inclusive), when 
England and Spain were at war; not earlier, while 
Charles' fantastic matrimonial expedition was going on, 
and not later, when peace had been patched up. The 
fact that England was more importantly at war with 
France from 1627, tends a little to narrow it to 1624- 
1627. This is a moderate proof of the date of these 
lines, or one of them; a proportionately smaller one, 
therefore, for the whole play. 

(2) The plot of "Webster's portion" of A Cure for 
a Cuckold is the same as, or similar to, that of other 
plays. It is a particular form of the favourite Eliza- 

260 



APPENDICES 261 

bethan motif, Mistress — ^Lover — Friend. On this point 
I have little to add to and not much to subtract from 
Dr. Stoll's arguments. The bulk of mine are a sum- 
mation of his. He seems to me to prove his point; not 
as conclusively as he believes ; still, to prove it. 

In giving a synopsis of the relevant parts of the plots 
of these plays I shall, for clearness' sake, call the pro- 
tagonist — the lover — A, the friend F, and the Lady L. 

(a) In Mars ton's Dutch Courtezan (1604) L (a 
courtezan) and F are in love first. F chucks her. L, 
for revenge, encourages A, who has conceived an over- 
whelming passion for her ; and promises herself to him 
if he will kill F. A promises to do so; on reflection 
repents, and warns F. They agree on a trick together, 
feign a quarrel, and pretend to fight a duel. F hides, 
and is given out as slain in the duel. To punish A for 
his folly he hides also from him. L, to complete her 
vengeance, has A arrested for murder. As A finds he 
cannot produce F to clear himself, he is in a bad way. 
At the last moment F, present in disguise, reveals him- 
self. L is led off^ to prison. A is cured of his passion ; 
and all is for the best. 

(6) In Massinger's The Parliament of Love (1624) 
A and L have been contracted in marriage ; A has, im- 
patiently, first proposed, and then forcibly attempted 
copulation before the marriage-ceremony ; and L is con- 
sequently possessed by hatred for him. The tale is told 
in four scenes. (II. 2) A insists on seeing L and offers 
to do anything she likes to obtain her pardon, and her. 



262 JOHN WEBSTER 

She accepts the bargain and bids him find out his best 
friend and kill him. 

(III. 2) A soliloquises that he has tried many friends 
with a proposal and none of them has turned out a 
true one. Enter F, who is ecstatic over an unhoped 
meeting with his mistress, which she has appointed for 
two hours hence. A is melancholy and tries to slip 
away. F insists on knowing the reason. A says he has 
to fight a duel shortly, and can't find a second. F in- 
sists on coming as second, and cutting his mistress, in 
spite of A's protestations. 

(IV. 2) They arrive at the duel-ground. A makes F 
swear to fight relentlessly ; then reveals the truth, he 
himself (A) is the ever detestable enemy. He insists on 
fighting, is beaten, but not killed. 

(V. 1) It is common talk that A has killed F, and 
that L has had A arrested for trial before "The Parlia- 
ment of Love." 

At the trial A is found guilty of murder, L of 
cruelty, and condemned. L repents and forgives A. F,^ 
supposed (by a trick arranged, presumably, with A) 
to be dead, rises from his bier. All is put right, and A 
and L marry. 

(c) In ^ Cure for a Cuckold, L (Clare) is secretly in 
love with F (Bonvile), who has been married, on the 
morning the play begins, to somebody else. The tale 
is told in five scenes. 

(I. 1) L is sad. A (Lessingham) renews a previous 
proposal to her. L will accept on one condition. A 



APPENDICES 263 

agrees. L tells him it is to find out and kill his best 
friend. 

(I. 2) A soliloquises. Enter some friends, and de- 
mand the reason of A's sadness. A says he must fight a 
duel next morning at Calais, and has no second; sec- 
onds to fight. He asks each to be his second. They re- 
fuse and exeunt. Enter F ; demands to know the reason 
of A's sadness. A reluctantly explains. F offers to 
come, and cut his wedding-night. A protests. F in- 
sists, in spite of the arrival on the scene of his newly- 
married wife. 

(III. 1) They arrive at the duel-ground. A says 
he has come to fight an innocent enemy; i.e. F, he re- 
veals. And he is so deep in love, he says, he must kill 
him. F quibbles that as a "friend" he now is dead. 
They part. 

(IV. 2) A reports to L F's death. L confesses her 
unhappy love for F and declares herself overjoyed. A 
turns against her. 

After some complications with the other part of the 
plot, 

(V. 2) A and L are reconciled, and marry. 

Before we can proceed to the comparison of these 
plots there is one point in A Cure for a Cuckold to be 
got clear. That is, Clare's motive in giving Lessing- 
ham the command. There are various remarks about 
it in the play. In I. 2, Lessingham, in his soliloquy, 
rather meekly wonders "what might her hidden purpose 
be in this?" He can only suggest that she has a psy- 
chological interest in proving the proposition that there 



264 JOHN WEBSTER 

is no such thing as friendship. In II. 4, Bonvile's ab- 
sence is commented on. Clare, in an aside, says : 

I fear myself most guilty for the absence 
Of the bridegroom. What our wills will do 
With over-rash and headlong peevishness 
To bring our calm discretions to repentance ! 
Lessingham's mistaken, quite out o* the way 
Of my purpose, too. 

In III. 1, in the dialogue between the friends, Lessing- 
ham has a new reason to suggest: 

. . . She loathes me, and has put. 

As she imagines, this impossible task. 
For ever to be quit and free from me. 

In III. 3. When the news comes that Bonvile is at 
Calais, as Lessingham's "second," Clare guesses the 
truth, and cries, aside again: 

fool Lessingham 
Thou hast mistook my injunction utterly. 
Utterly mistook it! . . . 

1 fear we both are lost. 

In IV. 2. Lessingham reports to Clare that he has 
fulfilled her injunctions. 

Clare. Then of all men you are most miserable : 

Nor have you ought furthered your suit in this, 
Though I enjoined you to 't; for I had thought 
That I had been the best esteemed friend 
You had i' the world. 

Less. Ye did not wish, I hope. 

That I should have murdered you. 



APPENDICES 265 

Clare. You shall perceive more 
Of that hereafter. . . , 

She asks who the slain friend is, and hears "Bonvile." 
At first she is "lost for ever." Then she suddenly 
changes and professes great pleasure, promises in- 
stantly to marry Lessingham, because he has rid her of 
her "dearest friend and fatalest enemy" — she was in 
love with Bonvile. 

And beholding him 
Before my face wedded unto another. 
And all my interest in him forfeited, 
I fell into despair; and at that instant 
You urging your suit to me, and I thinking 
That I had been your only friend i' the world, 
I heartily did wish you would have killed 
That friend yourself, to have ended all my sorrow. 
And had prepared it, that unwittingly 
You should have done 't by poison. 

Later, Lessingham turns against her, and leaves her. 
She, in a soliloquy, expresses great remorse : 

I am every way lost, and no m^ans to raise me 
But blessed repentance . . . 
. . . Now I suffer. 
Deservedly. 

Bonvile appears. She rejoices to find him alive. 
After some conversation — 

Clare (giving Bonvile a letter) 

. . . had you known this which I meant to have 

sent you. 
An hour 'fore you were married to your wife. 



266 JOHN WEBSTER 

The riddle had been construed. 
Bon. Strange! This expresses 
That you did love me. 
Clare. With a violent affection. 

Bon. Violent indeed; for it seems it was your purpose 
To have ended it in violence on your friend: 
The unfortunate Lessingham unwittingly 
Should have been the executioner. 
Clare. 'Tis true. 

In V. 2 she again expresses contrition to Lessing- 
ham: 

Clare. It was my cause 

That you were so possessed; and all these troubles 
Have from my peevish will original; 
I do repent, though you forgive me not. 

Dr. Stoll's impression is that Clare's motive is mainly 
meant to be jealousy of Bonvile (F) and a desire for 
his death, but that occasionally obscurity comes in and 
that she seems to have meant something else. As the 
motive in The Dutch Courtezan was also jealous hatred 
of F, while that in The Parliament of Love was hatred 
of A, this tells a little against Dr. Stoll's idea that The 
Parliament of Love came between The Dutch Courtezan 
and A Cure for a Cuckold, He brings the "obscurity 
of motivation" into service, however, by an ingenious 
theory of Webster starting with a plot where the motive 
was jealousy of F, and introducing phrases and ideas 
(e.g. "Kill for my sake the friend that loves thee dear- 
est") from the other, Parliament of Love, motivation 
of oflPended modesty. 



APPENDICES 267 

But this will not do. It is impossible to imagine 
that Webster had a mind with so extraordinarily feeble 
a grasp. And an inspection of the relevant passages, 
quoted above, shows the truth. Lessingham's own 
conjectures, of course, are astray. He is meant not to 
know what Clare is at. The only place which favours 
the view that her motive was a jealous desire for Bon- 
vile's death is where she confesses it to him, near the 
end of the play. If this is true, it is absolutely at vari- 
ance with the rest of the play, which is perfectly con- 
cordant with itself. We do not know, at the beginning 
of the play, that Lessingham's best friend is Bonvile. 
Nor, as far as we can see, does she. She once says, and 
once practically admits, to Lessingham, that her com- 
mand really meant that he was to kill her. And — which 
far outweighs anything said to another person, for that 
might be a lie — she twice, m an aside, says that Les- 
singham mistook her words and is doing something she 
did not intend. It is perfectly plain and indisputable. 
She was not aiming at Bonvile. Her remorse for her 
folly was natural, and does not demand the jealousy-of- 
Bonvile theory. And her statement to Bonvile must be 
explained away. 

It might be suggested that it was a desperate lie, and 
that the whole thing is a bad attempt at subtle psychol- 
ogy. Or much more probably, that it is an instance 
of the dangers that lurk for collaboration, especially if 
it is not contemporaneous ; and that one of the two 
authors, probably Rowley, misunderstood a part of the 
plot the other was responsible for, and innocently 



268 JOHN WEBSTER 

roused confusion. But I think the severer course of 
emendation can be shown to be absolutely necessary. 

For if you look at the passage (the last one quoted 
from IV. 2) you will see it is really impossible that 
"your friend" can refer to Bonvile, as it seems to. It 
makes nonsense of the whole passage! For in that 
case all the information he gets from the letter is that 
she loves him. And how would that have construed "the 
riddle ?" For the "riddle" included, by this hypothesis, 
her queer injunction to Lessingham and its hidden in- 
tention to end in Bonvile's death; all of which Bonvile 
would be ignorant of, an hour before his marriage, and 
which she'd be scarcely likely to reveal to him ! More- 
over, what does "unwittingly" mean! How do you 
kill a man "unwittingly," if you challenge him to a duel 
in order to kill him ? The whole thing is mad. 

Of course, some small change has to be made in the 
text. Either "on your friend" must be changed to "on 
yourself" ; or, more probably, "and" should be read for 
"on," and the whole should be punctuated : 

**To have ended it with violence ; and your friend. 
The unfortunate Lessingham, unwittingly," etc. 

and the whole tale is this. She gives him a letter which 
he was to have opened just before his marriage. He 
reads it. It tells him, first, that she loved him. He 
goes on reading, "Violent, indeed; . . . for it seems 
. . ." It seems, from the letter, that she had intended 
to "end" (the word fits, by this interpretation) her 



APPENDICES 269 

violent love with violence on herself. She was going to 
have had poison given her. And Lessingham was go- 
ing to have done it, "unwittingly." She has told Les- 
singham the whole story five minutes before (p. 309) 
in the same scene {v. the preceding quotation but one). 
She even used the same word, "unwittingly." Bonvile 
was to have learnt of her love and of her death at the 
same moment, and "the riddle had been construed." 

I have spent some time over this point in order to 
show that Webster (or Webster and Rowley) is per- 
fectly clear in his motivation in A Cure for a Cuckold, 
and that the motive was this. For it removes the only 
argument in favour of A Cure for a Cuckold preceding 
The Parliament of Love; and it may counteract the im- 
pression that might be produced by Dr. Stoll's harping 
on Webster's inability to make a plot with coherence 
or even normal sanity. 

To go back to the comparison of Massinger's, Mar- 
ston's, and Webster's plays ; when they are summarised 
in that way, it becomes immediately obvious either that 
there is some special connection between The Parlianient 
of Love and A Cure for a Cuckold, or that they have 
a common source other than The Dutch Courtezan, 
There are so many similarities ; the whole dramatisation 
of the tale and division into scenes, the "dearest friend" 
command, the search for him under pretext of asking 
for a second in a duel, the unsuccessful application to 
other friends, F cutting his mistress, the duel scene, 
the supposed death of F, and so on. They cannot pos- 



270 JOHN WEBSTER 

sibly have arisen from independent study of Marston's 
play. 

There may have been an intermediate step, a source, 
perhaps, in the first twenty years of the seventeenth 
century, and, if so, probably founded on Marston's 
play. Dr. Stoll does not consider the possibility of this. 
But we cannot rule it out. It would explain the general 
similarity, with such differences of motivation, etc., in 
Webster's and Massinger's plays. This intermediate 
source must have been either itself a play or a story 
that fell very easily and necessarily into certain scenes, 
as an apparently whole, already carved, chicken drops, 
as soon as you touch it, into neatly severed limbs. 
More than this one cannot say. There is little proof 
for or against an intermediate source. One can only 
admit its possibility. 

But if only these three plays are left us, which was 
intermediate. The Parliament of Love or A Cure for a 
Cuckold? The former is nearer to The Dutch Courte- 
zan in one point, the law-case at the end, in which L 
accuses A ; the latter in no point. This is some evidence, 
but not so strong as it seems, for the law-case at the 
end of The Parliament of Love is required anyhow by 
the whole plot, independently of this part. Then there 
are certain differences in treatment that may be signifi- 
cant. Webster comments on the strangeness of the 
seconds having to fight in the duel. Massinger accepts 
it without comment. Dr. Stoll thinks this a proof that 
Webster was the later. To me it seems more likely that 
the inventor of the story should have commented on a 



APPENDICES 271 

detail like this, and the man who took the story over, 
accepted it. Again, Webster directly presents A try- 
ing several friends in vain before he tries F ; Massinger 
only relates it. Is it more likely that Webster drama- 
tised what Massinger reported, or that Massinger made 
indirect what Webster gave directly? The former, I 
think ; so that this piece of evidence favours Massinger 
being the intermediary. Dr. Stoll suggests several 
pieces of more general evidence. (1) A Cure for a 
Cuckold shows the influence of Fletcher and Massinger. 
This would have happened if Webster had been imi- 
tating The Parliament of Love. Therefore he was imi- 
tating it. (2) Webster could not have invented so 
dramatic a sequence of scenes himself ; and Massinger — ■ 
and only Massinger — could. (3) Webster's muddling 
of motivation shows that he was trying to work The 
Parliament of Love motives into a diff*erent plot. (4) 
The mass of word-play and quibbling in Webster shows 
he was, later, an embroiderer. (5) Some of the later 
invented incidents, e.g., the duel-scene, and also the 
struggle in A's soul, are Massingerish. 

These are not really at all strong. (1) is bad logic. 
Webster would have shown — and did show — the influ- 
ence of the time anyhow. (2) These generalisations 
about Webster's capabilities, founded on such small 
data, are very dangerous. Possibly Webster could 
have invented these scenes. Certainly Rowley, his col- 
laborator, could. Massinger was not the only person. 
(3) I have disposed of. (4) has some weight: but as 



272 JOHN WEBSTER 

Webster was fond of these queer notions and verbal 
tricks (he still kept something of his heritage from 
Donne), and Massinger was less fond, it is not very con- 
vincing. (5) also has a little weight, but it is again 
dangerous to suppose that Webster and Rowley, writ- 
ing in the manner of Massinger's period, could not have 
caught something of that very second-rate magic. In 
any case the struggle in A's soul comes in The Dutch 
Courtezan, and ex hypothesi Webster could have used 
it, even if he hadn't the brains to think of it. 

Parts of some of these arguments, it may also be 
worth remarking, especially of (2) and (5), depend on 
The Dutch Courtezan, or something equally remote, 
being the immediate source of whichever of The Parlior 
ment of Love and A Cure for a Cuckold was the earlier. 

So far there has been a little evidence of the priority 
of Massinger's play. Dr. Stoll advances one more 
proof. He shows the evolution of various fragments of 
the Dutch Courtezan — Parliament of Love story, 
through forms that must have been familiar to Massin- 
ger. To begin with, there is The Scornful Lady (1609, 
or 10) by Beaumont and Fletcher. Massinger, who was 
a close student of their work, must have known it. In 
this play the elder Loveless has forced a kiss in public 
from the Lady. She condemns him to face the Channel, 
a year in France, and a French mistress. He goes and 
soon returns in disguise, to report his own death ; which 
scares her, for a minute, into confessing that she did 
love him. There is really very little of relevance in 



APPENDICES 273 

this : far less than Dr. Stoll makes out.^ But it has a 
certain resemblance to The Parliament of Love. 

The next instance is more interesting. The Little 
French Lawyer (1619 or 20), by Fletcher and Massin- 
ger, has a variant of the story. In this, A and F are 
going, as principal and second, to fight a duel. L gives 
A a sudden command, which will cause him to cut the 
duel and sacrifice his friend. There is the struggle be- 
tween love and friendship, in A's breast. Love wins. 
This is a curious modification of the other theme; but 
the similarity is not really great. There are minor de- 
tails of resemblance, which Dr. Stoll brings out clearly,^ 
though he exaggerates the main points. Most, at least, 
of this story in The Little French Lawyer, comes in 
Massinger's portion of the play.^ 

These two steps do not amount to much, but they 
help a little. We can see that Massinger's mind was 

*Dr. Stoll's great fault is that he is given to pressing evidence, 
carelessly and unfairly, in his own direction. He is too eager to 
prove a case. In this instance, a notable one, he says, that the elder 
Loveless "elicits" from the Lady, *'a rueful declaration, like Leo- 
nora's in the Parliament of Love, that were he alive she would 
marry him." It is a concoction of untruths. All the Lady says is 
that if she had been warned when Loveless was setting out, "these 
two arms had been his sea." As for Leonora she says nothing of 
the kind. All she says is that, rather than that Cleremond be exe- 
cuted and she live and die an anchoress in an eight-foot room built 
on his grave, she'll marry him. Cleremond is not dead, and nobody 
thinks he is. Perhaps Dr. Stoll was thinking of Bellisant, who 
is driven by the supposed death of Montrose to confess she loved 
him. But that belongs to another part of the plot. 

» Stoll, 168-170. 

H.e., in Act. I. (C. H. E. L. VI, pp. 139, 9). 



274. JOHN WEBSTER 

familiar with variants of the story and similar situa- 
tions. Since a comparison of his variant and Webster's 
has also made it seem more likely that Webster imitated 
him, we may conclude that if The Dutch Courtezan^ 
The Parliament of Love, and A Cure for a Cuckold are 
the only plays in the matter, that was probably the 
order in which they were written. The Parliament of 
Love was licensed in November 1624, so 1625 — is, by 
this department of the evidence, a probable date. 

We can only say then that this play was very likely 
written between 1625 and 1642 ; and rather more prob- 
ably before 1630 than after. 



QUESTIONS OF AUTHOESHIP 

A Cure for a Cuckold was first printed in 1661 by 
Kirkman, as by Webster and Rowley. This evidence 
is of very little value. That Webster's hand is to be 
found faintly in several parts of the play is shown with 
probability but not certainty, by Dr. StoU.^ His 
parallel passages seem to be the only proofs of his thatf 
have any validity. Beyond this we can say nothing; 
except that the under-plot, the Compass affair, is prob- 
ably not by Webster, and certainly might be by Rowley. 
How much share Rowley or anybody else had in the 
other part of the play, cannot be settled, at least with- 
out much more minute investigation than this problem 
has yet received. Mr. Spring-Rice's and Mr. Gosse's 

» Pp. 37-41. 



APPENDICES 275 

subtraction of the main plot of the play, and publica- 
tion of it by itself (as by Webster), satisfies one's ar- 
tistic feeling, more than one's desire for correct attribu- 
tion. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

A. EDITIONS 

B. CRITICISM, SOURCES, ETC. 

A. Editions 

The Works of John Webster. Collected by the Rev. Alex- 
ander Dyce. Four volumes, 1830. 
V- Reprinted 1857, one volume. 

The Dramatic Works of John Webster. Edited by Wil- 
liam Hazlitt. Four volumes. Library of Old Authors. 
1857. 

The White Devil and Duchess of Malfy. Ed. Sampson. 
1904. Belles Lettres Series. 

The Mermaid Series: Webster and Tourneur. Edited by 
J. A. Symonds, with introduction. 1888. Contains 
The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi,. 

The White Devil; or. The Tragedy of Paulo Giordano 
Ursini, Duke of Brachiano, with The Life and Death 
of Vittoria Corombona, the famous Venetian Curtizan. 
Acted by the Qwenes Majesties Servants. I6l2, 
quarto. 

Reprinted 1631, quarto. 
Reprinted 1665, quarto. 
Reprinted 1672, quarto. 

Injured Love; or. The Cruel Husband. By N[ahum] Tate. 
A Version of The White Devil. 1707- 

The White Devil. A Select Collection of Old Plays, vol. 
iii., Dodsley. 174-4. 
Reprinted 1780. Notes by Isaac Reed. Dodsley. 

The White Devil. The Ancient British Drama, vol. iii. 
.Edited by Sir Walter Scott. 1810. 

277 



278 JOHN WEBSTER 

The White Devil A Select Collection of Old Plays. Notes 
by Reed, Gilchrist, and the Editor (Collier 1825). 

Vittoria Corrombona, ou le Diable Blanc. Contemporains 
de Shakespeare. J. Webster et J. Ford. Traduits 
par Ernest Lafond. Paris, 1865. 

Vittoria Coromhona. Alt-englisches Theater. 

Herausgegeben von Robert Prolss. Two volumes. 
Leipzig. 
^'The Tragedy of the Dutchesse of Malfy, Quarto, 1623. 
Reprinted 1640, quarto. 
Reprinted 1678, quarto. 

The Duchesse of Malfy. l660 (circa), quarto. Probably 
reprint of first Quarto (v. Sampson, Webster*s White 
Devil, etc., p. 404). 

The Unfortunate Dutchesse of Malfy; or The Unnatural 
Brothers. Written by Mr. Webster. 1708, quarto 
(printed from 1678 edition for stage purposes). 

The Fatal Secret. A Tragedy. As acted at the Theatre 
Royal. By Lewis Theobald. A version of The Duch- 
ess of Malfi, 1735. (Preface avows Webster's author- 
ship.) 

The Duchesse of Malfy. The Ancient British Drama. 
1810. (Printed from 1670 Ed.) 

The Duchess of Malfi. Tallis's Acting Drama, part i., 
1851. (Altered and expurgated.) 

Die Herzogin von Amalfi. Shakespeare's Zeitgenossen und 
ihre Werke, 1858-1860. F. von Bodenstedt. ("The 
Duchess" is translated, the other plays summarised.) 

La Duchesse d' Amalfi. 1865. (Translated by Lafond.) 

The Duchess of Malfi. The Works of the British Drama- 
tists. John Keltic. 1870. 

The Duchess of Malfi. Dick's standard Plays. 1883. 

The Duchess of Malfi. The Best Elizabethan Plays. Ed- 
ited by W. R, Thayer. 1892. (Expurgated.) 

The Duchess of Malfi. Temple Dramatists. Edited C. 
Vaughan. 1896. 

The Duchess of Malfi. Ed. W. A. Neilson. 

The Malcontent. By John Marston. 1604. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 279 

The Malcontent. Augmented by Marston. With the addi- 
tions played by the King's Majesty's Servants. Writ- 
ten by John Webster. 1604. 

The Famous History of Sir Thomas Wyat. With the Coro- 
nation of Queen Mary and the Coming in of King 
Philip. As it was plaid by the Queens Majesties' 
Servants. Written by Thomas Dickers and John Web- 
ster. 1607. Reprinted in Two Old Plays. Ed. W. J. 
Blew. 1876. 

North-Ward Hoe, By Thomas Decker and John Webster. 
1607. 

West-Ward Hoe. Sundry Times acted by the Children of 
Paules. Written by Tho. Dekker and John Webster. 
1607. 

The Devil's Law-Case; or. When Women goe to Lam, the 
Devil is full of husinesse. A new Trage-comedy by 
John Webster. 1623. 

Appius and Virginia. A Tragedy by John Webster. 1654. 

A Cure for a Cuckold. A Pleasant Comedy. Written by 
John Webster and William Rowley. I66I. 

The Thracian Wonder. A Comical History by John Web- 
ster and William Rowley. I66I, 

Love's Graduate. A Comedy by John Webster. 1885. 
Edited by Stephen Spring-Rice. With an introduc- 
tion by Edmund Gosse. 

[Merely A Cure for a Cuckold with the sub-plot, the 
Compass story left out.] 

Monuments of Honor. Derived from remarkable antiquity 
and celebrated ... at the sole munificent charge . . . 
of the Worshipfull Fraternity of the Eminent Mer- 
chant Taylors. Invented and written by John Web- 
ster, Merchant Taylor. 1624. 

A Monumental Columne erected to the living Memory of the 
ever-glorious Henry, late Prince of Wales, By John 
Webster. I6l3. 



280 JOHN WEBSTER 



B. Criticism, Sources, etc. 

Retrospective Review. 1823. John Webster [anonymous 

article]. 
A True Relation of the deserved Death of that base and 

Insolent Tyrant, the most unworthy Marshall of 

France. . . A True Recital of those things that have 

been done in the Court of France since the Death of 

Marshall D'Ancre. I6l7. 
J. Q. Adams, Junior. Greene's Menaphon and The Thra- 

cian Wonder. Modern Philology, iii. 1906. 
W. Archer. Webster, Lamb, and Swinburne. New Review, 

1893. [Decrying Webster and the "Lamb Tradition" 

about the Elizabethans.] 
M. Bandello. Novelle. 1554-73. 
F. de Boaistuau and P. Belleforest. Histoires Tragiques. 

1580-2. 
J. le G. Brereton, 1909. Elizabethan Drama. 

[Contains revised version of the review of Prof. 

Sampson's The White Devil and The Duchess of 

Malfi, which appeared in Hermes, November 1905.] 
J. le Gay Brereton. The Relation of the Thracian Wonder 

to Greene's Menaphon. Mod. Language Review, Oc- 
tober 1906. 

Englische Studien. xxxvii., 1907. 
Crawford, C. Collectanea. Two Series. 1906-7. 

Series I., pp. 20-46. Webster and Sidney. 

Series II., pp. 1-63. Webster, Marston, Montaigne, 

Donne, etc. 

Reprinted from Notes and Queries. 
Gnoli, D. Vittoria Accoramboni. 1870. 
Gosse, Edmund. Seventeenth Century Studies, 1883. John 

Webster. 
Greg, W. W. Webster's White Devil. Modern Language 

Quarterly, Dec. 1900. 
Grimeston. Translation of Goulart's Histoires admirables 

et memorables de nostre temps. l607. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 281 

Hatcher, O. L. Sources and Authorship of the Thracian 
Wonder. Modern Language Notes, vol. xxiii., 19O8. 
P*^Hazlitt, William. Lectures on the Dramatic Literature of 
the Age of Elizabeth. 1821. 

Hunt, Mary Leland. Thomas Dekker. Columbia Uni- 
versity, 1911. [v. Appendix D.] 

Kiesow, K. Die verschiedenen Bearheitungen der Novelle 
von der Her bo gin von Amalf, des Bandello in den Lit- 
eraturen des xvi. und xvii. Jahrhunderts. 1895. 
i#-^ Lamb, Charles. Specimens of the English Dramatic Poets. 
1808. 2nd Ed., 1813. 

Lauschke, Johannes. John Webster's Tragodie Appius and 
Virginia. 1 899. 

Lee, Sidney. John Webster. Dictionary of National 
Biography, 1899- 

Lowell, J. R. The Old Dramatists. Webster. 1892. 

MacCracken, L. A Page of Forgotten History. 19II. 
{i.e. The Story of Vittoria.) 

Meiners, Martin. Metrische Untersuchungen uber den 
Dramatiker, John Webster. 1893. 

Michaelis, S. The Admirable History of the Passion and 
Conversion of a Penitent Woman, seduced by a Magi- 
cian. 1613. 

Murray, J. Tucker. English Dramatic Companies, 1585- 
1642. 2 vols., 1910. 

Painter, W. Palace of Pleasure. 1566. Two volumes. 

Pierce, F. E. The Collaboration of Webster and Dekker. 
1909. Reviewed by Dr. P. Aronstein in Beiblatt zur 
Anglia, 1910, p. 79- 

Rich, Barnabe. Nerv Description of Ireland. I6IO. 

Scheflfler, W. Thomas Dekker als Dramatiker. 1910. 

Sidney, Sir Philip. Arcadia. 1590. 

Stoll, E. E. John Webster. The Periods of his Work. 
1905. Reviewed by W. W. Greg in Modern Language 
Review, Oct. 1906. 
^■^ Swinburne, A. C. The Age of Shakespeare. I9O8. John 
Webster. 



282 JOHN WEBSTER 

Swinburne, A. C. Prologue to the Duchess of Malfy. 

Nineteenth Century, 1899- 

Studies in Prose and Poetry. John Webster, 1894<. 

Symonds, J. A. Italian Byways. 1883. Vittoria Acco- 

ramboni. 

Reprinted in his Studies in Italy and Greece, Second 

Series. 
The Repentance of Nathaniel Tindall that hilled his mother. 

July 2, 1624. 

A most bloody and unmatchahle murder committed in 

Whitechapel by Nathaniel Tindall upon his own 

mother, written by John Morgan. 

(I cannot find either of these in the British Museum. 

They may not be extant.) 
Vaughan, C. E. Tourneur and Webster, Article in Cam- 
bridge History of English Literature, vol. vi. 

Reviewed, Aronstein in Beiblatt zur Anglia, April 

1911. 
'Vopel, C. John Webster. 1888. 
Wurzbach, Wolfgang von. Jahrbuch der deutschen 

Shakespeare-Gesellschaft, 1898. John Webster. 



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